Group Exhibition
CCA Derry
Derry, Ireland
2025
Pliable Planes responds to ruin and architectural decay in urban landscapes. Small textiles are woven in response to the decay of the architectural structures, creating what Anni Albers refers to as a "pliable plane". These weavings are then joined with discarded building materials found in Derry to create a new sculptural form. It is a small architectural intervention and anticapitalist offering that reimagines the ruin as a site of creative regeneration facilitated by the soft power of textiles.
The textile is an ancestral technology created as a flexible, responsive and moveable structure that we can take on the move and literally wear on our bodies. Whether due to conflict, the climate crisis or other unfolding global catastrophes, our need to be able to pick up and go at a moment's notice looms large. As a city divided physically and politically by a river, Derry is vulnerable to these events. This work looks to textiles as a starting place from which to imagine and build new worlds. Though capitalism and the climate crisis can feel so overwhelming that we feel paralysed and unable to act, as Assata Shakur reminds us, "a wall is just a wall."