Urban Fabrick is a series of new works as it is the urban setting sustains Vicki Ames’s interest and specifically the visual language of architectural facades, particularly ephemeral surface qualities and what they reveal about the past from a contemporary perspective.

 

The making of artworks can be viewed as a search for an alternative language, through which to reconnect broken links and recuperate that, which is lost. A sense of this is evident in the work of Vicki Ames who views her practice as a process of re-possession of discarded ephemera.

 

Objects like people have a history, which can be discerned as a patina or accretion of alternations of their physical appearances, as traces or marks, which they have left behind.

 

Her use of the Japanese shibori methods of resist dyeing lends itself well to exploring these ideas.  Fine patterned effects are produced by dyeing stitched fabric and later removing the stitches, so that only a trace of their former presence and the labour through which they were created, remains. 

 

Her use of colour is central to this process and includes dyeing, fabric painting, hand embroidery and shibori methods of resist dyeing.

 

Ames is keenly aware of the sadness attendant with the passage of time and the cycle of birth and decay, including fading surfaces, worn and rusty objects or surfaces act as a kind of metaphor for the passage of time, but also as a an inspiration for transforming loss through the aesthetic experiences of craft-making.

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