gwen charles

Absolute Space Artists-in-Residence Program for 2025 ➌ Exhbition Opening

 

｜ The Search for Comfort and Safety｜

 gwen charles

 

Exhibition Period：2025.8.30 Sat - 9.14 Sun

Opening：2025.9.6 Sat 15:00-18:00

Forum: 2025. 9.6 Sat 15:30-17:00
Panelist： Li, Kuei-Pi (Artist)

 Opening Hours：Wed-Sun 12:00-18:00

 

 

Venue：SanHo Art Lab

Address：No. 14, Sanhe St., South Dist., Tainan City

Organizer： Absolute Space AIR

Co-organizer：GlogauAIR

Advisor： Ministry of Culture

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｜The Search for Comfort and Safety｜

 

Featuring works on the theme of rest, dynamic weather, safety and XiangYun temple clouds.

 

On this first visit to Asia, artist gwen charles arrived at her residency at Absolute Space AIR, Tainan prepared to discuss approaches to self-care and comfort with the Tainan community and continue to make artwork around the themes of comfort and grief after an intense period of caretaking and loss in her family. She has been using images of bedding as a symbol of comfort to encourage the audience to rest.
 

Interviewing members of the community in one-on-one conversations in her studio at Absolute Space, she asked them to share what brings them consolation during difficult moments, and requested they share pieces of textiles that may have a story of comfort. These textile piece have been combined through needle felting to create small blankets for a miniature three-dimensional model of her body. The needle felting process uses a barbed needle that pierces the fabric and tangles the threads together, using no sewing or glue. This process becomes a metaphor for the invisible connection between people, as nothing physical ties us together.

 

Inspired by the local temple culture and the integration of the divine in everyday life in Tainan “The City of Temples," she visited a temple daily, finding inspiration in the XiangYun, ancient stylized symbols of clouds within the temple walls. The clouds, a well-known symbol that express the space between earth and sky, human and divine, and intensity and softness,

Integrated the imagery into her work, these drawings incorporate the symbols of clouds and the previous theme of bedding to create a new image. Following the theory and tradition of painting depicting the natural landscape and weather in the Hudson River School inspired by European Romanticism, with soft brushstrokes and reverence for nature, she produced romanticized images of the herself hugging stylized clouds from the temple walls, combining Eastern and Western ideals into one image.

 

With an already established preoccupation with the influence of wind, clouds, storms, and meteorological and climatological phenomena on the human experience, gwen was overwhelmed with the weather extremes upon her arrival to the subtropical climate on the island of Taiwan. Heavy rains and wind from tropical storms and typhoons, not only disrupted her daily activities, but also brought a disruption of ideas and materials. The clouds, also became of symbol of the storms. After the storms, the streets were littered with debris, and safety tape was wrapped around buildings and trees.  Collecting safety tape from the streets after the storms, the tape became the base for several works on paper and digital collages created in direct collaboration with the environment. Overcome with the intense dynamic weather experiences, and perceiving the metaphor of weather and the inability to control the outside influences on our human lives, she created works focused on the search for safety, while also in fear of, yet holding a reverence for and sense of awe for Mother Nature.

The color fluorescent yellow repeats in the prints and highlights the intense lightning storms she experienced and the also reflect the color used for safety equipment.

 

Her works created at Absolute Space over her three-month residency period reflect her direct experience of Tainan, creating site-responsive works, through experimentation with printmaking, drawing, textiles, through interaction with the community and performance.