According to Michel Foucault, patterns on carpets are replicas of perfectly laid out geometric gardens. For centuries, the lavishly knotted floor- and wall paintings not only reflected prestige, they also created a central function for everyday life through their colourfulness and warmth. The carpet, centered in the point of view of life, was often served as a meeting place for the family in common. In her work, Mirjam Spoolder examines this long and cross-continental cultural history by cutting two used carpets from unknown households into many pieces of different sizes and then uniting them into a larger whole. In Spoolder’s artistic work, the carpet loses its original function, appearing as an aesthetic object to be observed and, at the same time, as a wearable vest that could provide warmth and protection when worn. The assembly of the unrelated parts is based on so-called Patchwork, a term that we also know as a «patchwork family» in the sociological context. The German social psychologist Heiner Keupp even speaks of a current «patchwork identity», which, due to individualization, pluralization and globalization in postmodernism, is increasingly composed of individual and non-collective needs and experiences. Because it is just the innermost, the beauty of the pattern or traces of use collected over the years, that Mirjam Spoolder almost completely denies our perspective. While, by first placing the back of the carpet with the sewn interfaces in the foreground, and she leaves it to our imagination to discuss the origin and history of the sculptural object.

Text Ana Vujic