Each personal genealogy is a tangible and intangible tree of our origin. The relationships between our experiences, memories and recollections comprise the formless layers that construct our personal histories. The most profound and universal connection resides in our blood links; by recalling everything that goes before us we inhabit it.
Ornella Ridone has embroidered a network of her own memories and experiences; a genealogical and mental atlas linked to seven generations of women in her family. She has embroidered living maps of shapes and figures that flow weightlessly without a precise horizon, about family and friends on clothing. In a rain of white gar- ments hundreds of drawings appear sewed with red thread, a vast imaginary where the artist reinvents timeless situations: vani- shed places, flowers, body fragments, orga- nic entities, and landscapes that bring us in and pull us back in a cosmos of delicately embedded figures.
There aren’t any human vestiges where textile work and dressmaking haven’t appeared as a base of human subsistence. Sewing and embroidering have been long been tasks of human beings. In its detailed and patient process, embroidery weaves a meditative and reflective life, always preserving time, memories and human connections. Embroidery has an essence which doesn’t allow us to consider fleeting images.
Ornella has embroidered an intimate seismography in the white surface of the garments perforated with crimson thread; in opposition to the fleeting and instant images of today. These embroidered clothes amount to perfection and reflect a meticulous sense, patience and nostalgia, what a mix of distinct sensations. The artist has stimulated an exploration of conscious and unconscious memories with an intuitive script with which she constructs the mesh of each drawing in red thread. Each little scene acts as a detonator for all types of memory associations. Thread 3047 is framed and defined by a dramatic and significant chromatic combination; the white of the pristine or circled feminine garments, always associated with the purity of women as the maximum essential virtue, and the red of thread 3047 as seen in the forms and figures that flow like blood, the blood of life, the loss of virginity and death.
On the other hand, the artist puts forward different narratives in the actions and the photographic bookmarks accomplished in a variety of environments in each of the garments, new lives in other contexts with a more precious significance in each piece. The performance conducted during the inauguration of the Oaxaca Textile Museum established a multisensorial relationship between the spectators, the actors and the artwork. To reiterate, these adorned garments temporarily perpetuate a new story and experience. Inside of a transformational atmosphere that flows and changes the processes that complete a sensitive cycle and bring a “ritual character” to the artwork.
In a ghost dance of snow white garments, a binnacle of embroidered stories in time and space, Ornella has constructed new relationships between thread and blood in an unusual universe.
back to: TEXTOS