Patricia Perales Garcia’s slim textile panels each hang from the curve of a chalky ceramic scroll, quietly announcing their arrival. Made from a strip of connected fabrics sourced from domestic items, antique textiles and offcuts of garments, their pale surfaces suggest years of use and the intimacy of being handled. On top of these surface fabrics sit blocks and curves of hand-dyed material that lap at each other like tongues. Some are delicately transparent—windows into the shapes beneath—and others are thicker, densely woven greens and browns reminiscent of damp fields and earth. Old stitches and woven lines sit next to new ones with the narrative urge of a tapestry, and painted sections, differently dense and textural, suggest the outline of tiled floors or panes of stained glass.
These pieces are constructed simultaneously, each unfolding in relation to another. Perales Garcia’s precise processes, sealing the first layer with paint and hand-stitching the shapes to their background, conjure up ideas of home and belonging that are less easily grasped. Painted terracotta vessels sit alongside these fabrics, hand-shaped and uneven with sketches of landscapes and reclining figures curving around their fluted, grooved contours. Striped towels and sheets and a lone ladder offer glimpses of domestic life amongst the bare outlines of trees and hills, collapsing the edges of memory and imagination with an evocative and gestural immediacy.
