Deoxygenation – Purple Passages
2020 - marble, Mexican smalti, Italian smalti, slate, and stone - 60cm x 86cm
Deoxygenation – Purple Passages lets go the confines of the square to horizontally stretch a series of layered passages. With ragged edges, as though a fragment torn from something larger, its lines resemble deoxygenated veins. These bounce and thread their way amongst intersecting grids of grey and white marble opus tesselatum.
Oxygenation – Pink Passages
2020 - marble, Mexican smalti, Italian smalti, slate, and stone - 60cm x 86cm
This is Purple Passages’s partner. It celebrates passages of tone and structure. The pink marble has a softness about it and is warmed by the chestnut adhesive which provides a sensitivity to the stone.
Lungs - The Space Between the Passages
2021 - marble and Italian smalti - 60cm x 80cm
Lungs - The Space Between the Passages is an abstracted x-ray to explore how the passages between the tesserae could be used to describe the ribs. The slate divides the lungs into its segments, and the elevated heart, as an oxygen pump. Mindfulness and a heightened consciousness of breath is essential to maintaining equilibrium.
Lungs - Between the Spaces
2021 - marble and Italian smalti- 60cm x 80cm
Lungs - Between the Spacesi> is an abstracted x-ray of the lungs, heart and vertebrae and invokes the breath of Covid-19. The hand cut materials oscillate to create varied spaces, textures, tone, contour and height, creating rigorous dialogue between materials and processes, texture and surface.
Convex - Inhale
2020 - marble, avocado pigment adhesive - 30cm x 30cm on 62cm x 62cm pressed metal ceiling sheet
Inhale – the lungs expand. Oxygen rushes into the blood through the passages of blood vessels around the materials of the lungs – the alveoli. It gives life. The blue turns to red. It lights up the strong passages. It lives. It is alive. The pressed metal tin panel supports the mosaic, like how the ribs and the vertebrae support the lungs.
Concave – Exhale
2020 - marble, Italian smalti - 30cm x 30cm on 62cm x 62cm pressed metal ceiling sheet
Exhale – the lungs collapse. It’s blue. It has the power to initiate death if the passages do not open up again. The carbon dioxide initiates the next breath. Where’s the passage of life?
Reading between the Lines
2020 - marble - 30cm x 30cm on 62cm x 62cm pressed metal ceiling sheet
We can be misled, but sometimes we need to explore into or among the deeper aspects of something, as opposed to that are most easily identified.
Broken
2020 - marble, Italian & Mexican smalti and stone - 30cm x 30cm on 62cm x 62cm - pressed metal ceiling sheet
When one suffers from mental illness, you can feel broken. It's like a fracture and this passage or broken bone will always be on x-ray. It reminds one "That things don't go back together" when broken.
Darkness
2020 - marble, Italian smalti, slate on recycled ceiling pressed metal - 30cm x 30cm on 62cm x 62cm pressed metal ceiling sheet
The passage to shine has been broken. One is trying to find another thread in this darkness. But it is not easy. It is difficult to commit to life in the real world! The passage has been broken again and again.
Lines… which one am I?
2020 - marble, Italian smalti, slate on recycled ceiling pressed metal - 30cm x 30cm on 62cm x 62cm pressed metal ceiling sheet
The small fragile slate passages or messages can be initially overlooked. But I don’t tell what, where, when and which passage, because to disclose is to shed. It is too vulnerable, but yet complex. The passages are varied and sometimes simply constructed through tone and small tesserae developing into larger, but provide the complexity of wellness. The next passage sometimes sits underneath, or just goes off in a bizarre angle.
Six panels of Threaded Passages
2020 - marble, Mexican smalti, Italian smalti, slate, and stone on pressed metal ceiling sheets - 124cm x 186cm
Inhale and Exhale
2020 - marble, Mexican smalti, Italian smalti, slate, and stone on pressed metal ceiling sheets
THREADED PASSAGES
Threaded Passages celebrates my completion of Dialogue of the O.K! It is time to breathe again. The passages symbolise the oxygen that keeps conversations of mental health wellness alive. These passages or messages are like mental illness. They have many shapes, sizes, tones and varying levels of complexity. Threaded Passages is about giving permission to thread or provide a passage to connect one day or one week to the next. Each thread is clear and not random, but deliberate. The viewer can jump in and out of these breathing threads, that are simultaneously strong and unstable, restless and without a singular point of arrival.
These non-figurative works let go the confines of the traditional square or rectangular frame. Their edges are torn; they are free and unbounded. As the marble undulates, it breathes again and in a different form. The stone is permanent, but the breath is momentary and permeable. The stone seems to expand and contract as it relaxes with each breath. Threaded Passages is about letting go. Letting go by working with tone, responding to materials, exploring different cutting and tessera setting nuances, varying the ‘interstices’ in terms of shape and colour also, and giving each tessera an individual voice.
To me the real focus lies within the small fragile passages that are so easily overlooked. To find their beauty is about learning to breathe again. It should be automatic but it’s not. You have to look for it. So much effort, and some days more than others. I inhale. I exhale. Which passage of my lungs will ever fully inhale again? To really breathe. I’m trying to find another passage through. But it is not easy. The passage has been broken again and again. One hospital admission after another. So many threaded passages ….
Photography - Pamela Kleeman-Passi