Exhibitions at Place des Arts

Mardell Rampton creates contemporary abstract textile paintings using her own hand-dyed, painted and marked cloth and commercial textiles. The work varies from subtle to vibrant: the influence of a long-standing love of the oceans, skies and forests of the West Coast of Vancouver Island permeates the pieces. Choosing to work in series, Rampton explores a number of topics, including Balance, Equilibrium, Connections and Beaches.

Central to the textile paintings in this exhibition is the tension between striving to achieve balance while immersed in a continual state of imbalance. The elements in the artworks depict different sensations, sometimes disconnected, sometimes on a tangent striving to regain connection with the center, other times unable to reach a place of groundedness.

Rampton’s love of textiles, texture and colour come together in her artwork. Much of the cloth is hand dyed, hand painted and marked. Each piece of cloth is cut, one small, thin organically shaped rectangle at a time, then stitched together to form the initial layer of the composition. After layering this over a bamboo batting and a cotton backing, metres upon metres of thread is added by densely stitching over the entire surface to add additional colour and three-dimensional texture, drawing viewers in to see the nuances of the details.
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