The forest exists outside of time. There is a musty, grassy smell as sweet-sour as an animal’s fleece. In the dark room, the woven figures hang down like vast pelts or rise like mossy trees. The fleshy folds could be inviting but intestinal rope falls out of a few sculptures and coils across the floor like a warning. These ahistoric beings stand like the unmoved sentinels of a long-forgotten world in Tate Modern’s new exhibition Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle Of Thread And Rope, writes Madeleine Kelly.
Abakanowicz was born Marta Magdalena Abakanowicz in 1930. The child of aristocratic parents, her early childhood was spent playing in the forests around her family estate. The family retreated permanently to this estate after Poland’s invasion by Nazi Germany in 1939. But the forest would not remain a safe place to hide and in 1943 German soldiers broke into the family home and an explosion severed her mother’s arm.
Abakanowicz graduated from the Academy of Fine Art, Warsaw in 1954 and by 1962 was being recognised at 1st International Tapestry Biennial in Lausanne. By the mid-60s, her tapestries began working their way off the wall and into space. These early experiments defy the rectangular weft and warp of the loom, a practice the artist called ‘loom thinking’.
In 1967 she began to produce her first three-dimensional textiles and it is these works that form the textile wood, a place haunted by the traumas of her and her nation’s youth. In the figures – named ‘Abakans’ by a bewildered critic – Abakanowicz found a place to hide much like the forest of her childhood. She very much meant the sculptures to feel like a world of their own. By the late 60s, she made Abakans in groups to be displayed together as ‘environments’, or installations as we might call them now.
Abakanowicz’s career spanned over 50 years but in this retrospective, curators Ann Coxon and Mary Jane Jacob focus on the years spanning the mid-50s to the early 70s. The forest of thread is in the penultimate room, but the show starts with its seedlings.
In choosing to focus on one decade, the curators allow us to follow the thread of the Abakans through the artist’s work. The Tate has pierced slits in the walls of the exhibition through which you might view the next rooms so that standing in the shadowy world of the forest you might look back to the first tapestries. This also allows the viewer to understand the staggering achievement and mastery of the Abakans as they work against the traditional logic of the loom without losing tension or life.
The final result is a fibrous world that threatens to engulf the viewer, its organic folds at once a hiding place and a smothering. The ancient Abakans hang like passive witnesses of our bloodied pasts – the promise of a natural world that, if it will not forgive us, will at least outlive us.
Tate Modern, Bankside, SE1 9TG until 21st May. Admission: £16
Booking: www.tate.org.uk
