Gran Abertura #2

Working across the boundaries dividing painting, sculpture and textile, Amanda Ross Ho’s Gran-Abertura series asks us to consider the relationship between artistic material and form. With its roughhewn yet elegant patterning Gran-Abertura #2 has the folksy quality of a macramé hanging – and it is in fact based on a photograph found by the artist in a vintage macramé craft book. However, Ross Ho has converted the form of the wall-hanging into something between a painting and a sculpture, its design incised on a free-standing panel of wood. While the three-dimensionality of the original pattern is transfigured into a flat form, the punctured surface and imposing size of the panel nonetheless give the piece its own kind of depth and physical presence; Ross Ho invites us to think about how our sense of the design mutates as we adjust to the physical dimensions of the work. Ross Ho has talked about the way in which she was inspired by the photographs inside the craft books ‘translat[ing] real things into images that can then be used by anyone to bring those lost objects back into the material world’, and accordingly, Gran-Abertura #2 itself documents how patterns shimmer across material dimensions, as objects are translated into images and back again into objects.