The Fabric of Fieldwork by WESSIELING and Susan Ossman

The Fabric of Fieldwork combines for the first time the work of WESSIELING and Susan Ossman in an exhibition of paintings, sculpture and installations inspired by their ongoing ethnographic research in East Asia (WESSIELING) and North Africa (Ossman).

The exhibition examines culture and society through the stitching, weaving and washing of fabrics and all its connotations.

Using art both as a recording device and a way of creating a field of exploration WESSIELING and Ossman investigate issues of visibility, femininity and women’s work, including their own field weaving as artists and ethnographers.

WESSIELING is a London based visual artist whose work uses text and installations to address the immateriality and symbolic power of fashion. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including the Victoria & Albert Museum, Collyer Bristow Gallery, Hong Kong Arts Centre and Austrian National Museum of Applied and Contemporary Arts among others. From 28 April - 7 July 2012, her work is shown in Saltram House (Plymouth) and Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery. Further projects can be viewed at www.WESSIELING.com .

Susan Ossman is a California based artist and anthropologist exhibiting for the first time in the UK Susan’s paintings stitch together colour fields and remnants of field notes with painterly gestures, intermingling English, Arabic and French words emerge out of collages to suggest spaces where the places of her ethnographic observations imaginatively come together.