Gizella K Warburton: the ritual process of fibre-art making

Wall works and sculptural pieces and installations include works on slate and weathered wood grounds, printed and woven elements, and sculptural forms and vessels.

Gizella is a member of  ‘Contemporary Applied Arts’ in London, through which a piece has been acquired for the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. She is also represented by Browngrotta Arts, who present museum-quality contemporary artworks by artists working for the most part in fibre.

'morphus iv and v'

The work has a raw and simple materiality grounded in resonant and sensory experience of place. Layers of detail are revealed or hidden as light and shadow pass across and through surfaces, echoing the transience of emotional and physical landscape. Abstract compositions evolve through the tactile and contemplative process of drawing with paper, cloth and thread. Their making involves a series of ritual processes; wrapping, binding, layering, piercing, knotting, stitching and suturing and burning. The burnishing, staining, abrading, shadowing and marking of surfaces continues the dialogue Gizella quietly has with each piece, and that which it has in relation to others within a series.

‘These wrapped and sculpted vessel forms are quietly resonant of internal spaces and external skins, of scarred and fissured surfaces, of abrasions, bindings and sutures.’

'Notes', detail

Image source: Gizella K Warburton