Tristesse Seeliger – A Soft Geometry
Tristesse Seeliger – A Soft Geometry
This new body of work emerged during a deliberate pause in my studio practice—a rare moment of stillness after the close of a solo exhibition, when, for the first time in years, my calendar was free of deadlines, shows, or specific commitments. In that open space, I accepted an invitation from my mother-in-law, a talented weaver, to learn a process I had long admired in the handwoven textiles she gifted our family each year: quiet, functional works that carried their own material poetics.
Over the past eighteen months, I have immersed myself in weaving—not as an end, but to reframe how I approach painting. In these works, the handwoven canvas is not just a support but an active ground, both formally and conceptually. I begin by dyeing warp threads as a first gesture, allowing colour relationships to emerge through the interlacing of fibres. Approaching colour in this way—as a painter might—has led me to combinations that feel unexpected in a weaving context. The chromatic blending happens not through pigment but through the eye’s perception of adjacency, a result of the unique optical effects produced by the technique and material.
The woven surface introduces a tactile dimensionality that challenges painting’s conventional flatness. Thicker threads act as both mark and medium, creating a grid-like structure that shapes the way paint moves across the surface. In some pieces, the process feels precious and high stakes; the woven canvas is so labor-intensive that I plan the composition digitally before paint touches the surface. Yet the loom always reasserts its own material presence—insisting on slowness, care, and an embodied knowledge of making.
In these woven paintings, the grid operates as both a formal structure and a conceptual proposition. At times, I follow the grid’s logic, using the woven surface as a framework for layered geometries that echo and extend its order. At other times, I push against the grid, allowing the weave’s texture to disrupt the surface, using it as a gestural element—like a brushstroke embedded within the painting itself.
There’s a moment in the process, particularly before the paint is applied, when the cloth can feel humble, common, overlooked—an anonymous support for something else. But it’s exactly this familiarity, this quiet ubiquity of fabric in daily life, that draws me in. Woven work isn’t simple – it is our familiarity with cloth that creates this perception of it. Hand woven cloth is artwork. These works aim to hold space for the overlooked labor embedded in domestic textiles, and to question the hierarchies between art and craft, background and foreground, the ordinary and the extraordinary. By painting on cloth I have woven, I hope to draw attention to the intimacy and rigour of material practices that are both everyday and quietly radical radical now because the slow process of weaving by hand has been largely replaced by machines, rendering the skill increasingly rare.
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Tristesse Seeliger