Tina Struthers is a Quebec based Canadian textile artist born in Cape Town, South Africa. Her solo exhibition Codex II launches March 19 at the Mary E. Black Gallery. Struthers’ large-scale textile sculptures and murals explore the uncertain and mutable consequences of humans on our environment. Her personal experiences and observations of immigration and human dis/placement are reflected in the forms and surface treatment of her work.
The collection of works in Codex II cast alien silhouettes with textured tendrils reaching from soft, stuffed sculptures. The forms are drawn from flora and fauna of the multiple places she has called home and the material processes Tina Struthers uses mirrors the metamorphosis that our world perpetually exists in. “Never static, their ever changing realities are only visible to us in time as we experience it. This quality of change, of imperceptible movement into decay on one hand and exuberant growth on the other, is one of the things that inspires my abstractions.” – Tina Struthers
Beyond this natural shifting, is the constant of human intervention as we migrate across the surface of the earth, effecting, destroying, growing and creating. Struthers says her process “is anchored in creating sculptural forms and clothing them in contrasts. Through shredding, cutting and the destructive manipulation of textiles, scars and wounds are created that are then often mended with hand stitched and layered fabric elements.”
