Sarah McNulty has been working on a new series of large-scale tufted works for an upcoming exhibition, Crawl. During her residency at SVFK she has been experimenting with transposing painterly gestures and forms into floor-based works.
Feb. 2025
Exploring the textile format of the rug with various materials, shape and scale, the project investigates the possibilities, limitations and connotations of the media and process. Focusing on motives of rupture, spill and rot, the works investigate underlying faults, imperceptible layers, and the potential that arises amidst collapse. They explore subterranean and temporal shifts, how we re-inhabit overseen spaces, and transitions from concealment to exposure.
By working with a medium traditionally underfoot, beneath our standard vantage point, and for domestic rooms, the works refer to interior and personal spaces. These are objects we touch more than see, images met indirectly from bird’s eye view, that we physically feel below us, where we walk, crawl, lie.
The process of tufting requires working from behind the canvas, and inverting the direct contact to an image and the process of building up layers. Crawl comes after another recent project working in reverse with cold painting, or hinterglasmalerei, at Polychrome. Here she made a series of paintings on glass windows for the street painted from behind, and Crawl extends an experiments building up images out of view, a prediction or intention which explores how to disrupt and unfold images.
The works will be installed into the idiosyncratic architectural elements of the exhibition space, Vermland Basement, in the former locker rooms of the AGA gas factory. When the factory moved out in 2020, it was left abandoned and raw, with the original mirrors, sinks, pipes and tiles, as remnants of its former inhabitants.
The subterranean nature of the space resonates as an intimate and anonymous space for changing and showering, and transitioning from one setting to another. It has evolved over the last few years as artists have intervened, shifting and re-framing the space.
The resulting works from the tufting workshop are formed as organic shapes, leaks, puddles, fissures, to grow and eek out of the corners and edges of the floor and walls. In this way the boundaries of a possible image expand, and the physical room forms the surface. The works have inbuilt gaps and holes, clipped out, so that the architectural visual elements of the exhibition space seep through, to merge and frame the existing room, opening the space physically and temporally.
