Sacred Threads: A Dialogue in Divination
Exploring threads, symbols, and heritage, Becky Dodman Wainwright’s exhibition for Field System explores folk through an expanded lens. Woven between Dartmoor, Devon and the mountains of the Andes, this exhibition presents a dialogue between her multi racial identity, her ancestral roots, and her home.
Grounded in her life in Devon, Wainwright’s large-scale tapestries are born from the practice of tasseography, tea leaf reading. Abstract, intuitive forms discovered at the bottom of a cup are transformed into designs, created from local wool. This process of divination, created with people, is a way of finding meaning and pattern in the everyday, rooting her creative spirit in the soil she stands on.
This connection to place opens a channel to her Colombian ancestors. This exhibition explores the sacred signs and symbols found in Chumbe belts, intricate sashes worn by Indigenous shamans in the Andean highlands and across Colombia. Wainwright's Great Grandmother was from an Indigenous Community in the Chaparrel area of Colombia, so paying attention to these belts, and folk artefacts, with their patterns, represent living, ancestral language. For this exhibition, her work embarks on new dialogues between the act of sigil-making and divination practice, through to exploring this sacred Andean visual language. From large scale tapestries, small woven belts, to other textile artefacts, this exhibition serves as an ongoing dialogue with self, intention, place and spirit from a mixed heritage perspective.
As a Senior Lecturer and Course Leader of Postgraduate Studies, and textile artist, Wainwright’s artistic practice is informed by her academic research into living heritage and the ethics of textile investigation. Her art is a physical manifestation of this inquiry, an act of reclaiming heritage threads and repairing severed connections. The tapestries and artefacts displayed here are more than objects; they are conversations. They speak of a relationship between Devon and Colombia, mapping a journey from the abstract divination of a tea leaf to the sacred, ancestral symbols of a culture she seeks to reclaim.