tl;dr

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is pleased to present Qualeasha Wood’s first European solo exhibition. Wood’s textile practice brings together traditional craft techniques and contemporary technology, combining digital and analogue processes in the creation of her tapestries and tuftings.

In a new body of work, Wood continues to probe racial, sexual and gender identity, particularly as they relate to the Black femme body, turning her attention to themes of surveillance and vulnerability. While the artist’s self-portrait remains a compelling presence in her tapestries, the imagery has pivoted to account for the daily experience of practising safety as a Black woman, both on- and off-line. Her continued fetishisation in digital and, increasingly, in art spaces, has led Wood to explore a new visual language, executed in a distinct palette in which the colour white acts as a loaded signifier for purity and innocence. Error message pop-ups serve at once as boundary and barrier, impeding the viewer’s access to the subject and demanding a mediated approach. The bridge between craft and digital art finds a compelling conduit in Wood’s use of jacquard weave, where a pixel equates to a stitch.

Religious symbolism has played a central role in Wood’s work to date and while its iconography is less pronounced in her new tapestries, its influence remains a key theme. The notion of a devotional relationship and its association with idolatry is observed in a pair of found prayer kneelers, their cushions upholstered in a bespoke jacquard weave designed by the artist. Meanwhile, Wood’s tuftings mark both a technical and visual shift from the tapestries. In these works, Wood adopts a naïve aesthetic that calls on the nostalgia of cartoon animations and their association with racial stereotyping to unpack notions of Black girlhood. Despite their formal simplicity, the tuftings reveal a tension drawn from her own experiences of consuming media rife with anti-Black prejudice from an early age.