Making My Way
A solo exhibition by Pia Truscott
Mezzanine Gallery: 30.04.26 - 11.06.26
‘All maps are thematic, personal maps even more so; like everyone else, I lay down my lines and sail the wobbly grid.’ - Katherine Harmon
For the past year I have found solace in maps, or more accurately, the verb ‘to map.’ To map can be many things: to chart, to follow, to navigate, to outline. Importantly, this act of mapping might help me better ‘find my way.’
In this exhibition, I present a series of wire arrangements or ‘drawings’ which are entangled with everyday materials. I consider these works to be an imagined place, a tumbled record of my daily environment. In these works, I imagine a landscape entangled with everyday fragments. Akin to a magpie or to a fence, I like to collect things that fall and fly my way. I let myself hook and be hooked by them. This is also my way of paying attention to the world.
I gather these fragments and add them to the wire to build up layers in the work. In this new context, these commonplace materials - a grey button, for example - take on new value, reanimated in relation to one another.
In the same way a pencil moves across a page, these suspended wires and ribbons trace pathways reminiscent of contour lines. Some are taut, and others are tangled, curling, looping. Through an intimate process of arranging, knotting and suspending, I create my own order and pattern of the world around me. Layering pathways on top of one another, the works take on a sculptural dimension where linear space is interrupted with moments held in colour and texture. I work intuitively in the same way I would compose a painting - slowly building up line, colour and form within the composition.
Things are precarious and can be rearranged at any moment; they are also my own pattern of things. I am trying to find my bearings and make things make sense. In uncertain times, my practice has become a quiet act of grounding. Making my Way traces the contours of a personal geography, tentatively finding a way forward.
