jane kidd

The tapestries in the  "Possession Series" explore the implications of accumulating, collecting and displaying objects from material culture and the natural world. In this series I am interested in the human desire to possess and assimilate the natural world into material culture and recreate nature under human control through translation into the decorative, systems of notation and collection. I have been influenced by 16th Century cabinets of curiosities and later natural history collections that bring into question the relationship between knowledge and control and that reflect our continuing anthropocentric attitude to the natural world.

I use a compartmentalized composition to collect and juxtaposition historic and contemporary tools, reference to botanical drawings, taxonomy, diagrams and mapping. I also reference historic textiles emphasizing those that show evidence of colonialism and cross-cultural exchange, drawing parallels between the human urge to transform the natural world into material culture and the West's preoccupation with accumulating and possessing other cultures. Each tapestry in the series is marked with an imprint of a human fingerprint in the lower right corner.