Delicate Creatures
2024
Cotton warp
Mohair and silk weft
TC2 Jacquard
This work intervenes in the visual language of traditional floral ornamentation by integrating the spider, a figure often pathologized within aesthetic and cultural frameworks, into a refined, symmetrical composition. At first glance, the pattern adheres to conventions of decorative beauty; however, the presence of the spider subtly disrupts this familiarity, prompting a reevaluation of aesthetic hierarchies. By embedding the arachnid within a field of blooms, the piece examines the cultural processes through which beauty is codified, challenging viewers to reconsider the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in visual representation. The spider, long associated with fear and repulsion, is here rendered with the same care and grace as the floral forms, suggesting an alternative epistemology, one in which the unsettling and the ornamental coexist. The work thus operates as a critique of normative aesthetics, proposing that beauty emerges not from purity or predictability, but from expanded ways of seeing.
