“Interlaced: Animation and Textiles” (with catalog)
Govett Brewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Gallery
New Plymouth, New Zealand
Dec 7, 2024 - April 27, 2025
Spanning the gallery and cinema spaces of the Len Lye Centre, Interlaced brings together moving-image works fashioned from textile materials and patterns alongside fiber works inspired by visual transformations made possible by animation.
Artists featured in the exhibition explore ways of embroidering with projected light, quilting celluloid films, and weaving digital tapestries. By braiding together contemporary animation and textile art, Interlaced highlights the influence of textile history and culture on artisanal media production.
The work of renowned experimental filmmaker Len Lye (1901-1980) plays an important connective role in the exhibition. Interlaced makes a compelling case for the influence of Pacific tapa design and British textile production on Lye’s innovative animation techniques. Nesting Len Lye’s animated films in a broader field of analogue and digital media, Interlaced explores the enduring capacity of textile forms to make visible animating forces and to reanimate intergenerational cultural memory.