Leonid Tishkov
you are here: Art > Artists > Leonid Tishkov
Snow Angel a short documentary film made about Leonid Tishkov work
Leonid Tishkov
Divers from Heaven
The Vyazanik (The Knitling)
21 June – 7 September
Compton Verney, The Fabric of Myth exhibition
This exhibition explores the theme of myths through the medium and history of textiles. From Ariadne's thread to the story of Arachne transformed from weaver to spider, these narratives have communicated associations including redemption, protection, metamorphosis and communication.
Leonid Tishkov, a Moscow artist, works in different genres and media including painting, caricature, book art, poetry, video and performance, developing traditions of absurdism and surrealism in Russian culture.
Viazanik (The Knitling)
2002
Leonid Tishkov: "I asked my mother to knit me a suit from our family’s old clothes. If you put it on, it protects you, it surrounds and embraces you like all my extended family in that old photo. I named the suit Knitling.
Now he is a new creature, created by the two main components of my art: the phenomena of time and place."
Home-made Art
Textile sculptures and transformed objects
Leonid Tishkov: “After the death of my mother, her clothes remained in the house. Dresses, shawls, shirts, underwear. Solitary dresses hung in the wardrobe, taciturn, on wooden hangers. One of them was a severe black woollen dress, the kind that a primary school teacher would wear. Another one, made of Chinese silk with a floral pattern, was the one she liked to wear on holidays. What was I to do with all these things that were left after her death? Remembering how my mother tore up her old clothes into ribbons for weaving rugs, I tore her dress into a ribbon, one never-ending ribbon, winding ball after ball. I tore it all up, shredded it into "makhoriki", as she used to say.
That was how the dematerialisation of her clothes took place, their transformation into balls, so that they looked like atoms, twisted out of electrons, being preserved inside my mother's nucleus. "What beautiful material, one day I will sew a dress out of it", my mother said once. In the word "dematerialisation" one can hear both the word "material" and the word "maternal". And so it was only the shadows of the dresses that remained on the walls, naked hangers on a nail, a memory in the heart, treasured melancholia and a velvet photograph album. The multitude of colourful atomic knots from which the present-day reality – a house of peace – is now constructed is fortified by memory and love.
The torn up clothes, intertwining knots winding balls, connected shreds and broken links are filled with a metaphysical meaning permeating the fabric's soul – sublimation. By linking male and female, alienating the world, enlightening oneself with spiritual strength, we come to the connection of two beginnings, to the simple home-made art of crochet work.”
