Diamonds

Location

Country: UK
City: England
Place: Manchester, DCMS Hub

Bharti Parmer works frequently with vernacular crafts and systems, subverting them to make political propositions. She is particularly interested in ‘overlooked’ modes of making or art forms that might be considered popular or amateur ways of working, and investigates this within a variety of media, from textiles and print to photography and sculpture. In this portfolio of prints, she foregrounds the textures and materiality of wood in different forms.The tactile appearance of each individual piece of material that she uses to print from, contrasts with the tessellated forms or whole, clean geometric structures she depicts them in. To tessellate is to fit together a pattern of shapes, without any gaps between them. Tesserae refers to the individual elements of such a pattern, usually in reference to mosaics but in this case to the individual pieces of wood used to make up the full shape. The work, as the title suggests, speaks to ideas of society today, with individuals, each with their own qualities and histories, being brought together to create the whole.

Bharti Parmar is a visual artist and academic. Her work often references the points of contact between art and craft. She received her BFA at Coventry Polytechnic in 1989, going on to the Royal College of Art in London to receive an MA in Fine Art Printing and then a doctorate from the University of Wolverhampton with a focus on the poetics of Victorian material culture. She has researched and spoken at length on material culture studies, textiles and craft, as well as Empire and the postcolonial archive. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery as part of the British Textile Biennial (2021); Hospital Club. London (2019); New Art Gallery, Walsall (2000) and in group exhibitions including at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2024); Compton Verney Art Gallery (2024); Crafts Council, London (2023 & 2022); Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (2022); Crafts Council, London (2021); Coventry Biennial of Contemporary Art (2019); Royal College of Art, London (2018); and Chelsea College of Arts, London (2016)

Places

Subjects

abstract - shapes & forms, diamond (as shape)

Materials & Techniques

paper (as artists material), print (as object name), manual relief print, woodcut

Artist

Bharti Parmar (1966 - )

Title

Diamonds

Portfolio Title

Tesserae, Shapes that Tessellate

Date

2018

Medium

woodcut print on paper

Dimensions

height: 43.0 cm; width: 54.0 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from the artist, July 2021

Provenance

The artist; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 12 July 2021

GAC number

19015/4