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Lot Essay
Throughout her career, Maria Lai’s concern with the female voice has dominated her practice, drawing her eye to the traditions, customs and histories that remain intimately connected with the feminine experience of the women in her hometown of Ulassai, on the island of Sardinia. With the series of Lenzuolo (Bedsheets) that emerged in the 1980s, she transformed sewing into a purely artistic action, playing with the techniques and gestures of the time-honoured craft to create poetically conceptual artworks that marry the past with the present, tradition with innovation, and the visible with the invisible. In these striking works, small rectangles of fabric punctuated by lyrical lines of black thread are sewn onto a large bed sheet, their shapes and structures resembling pages torn from a book or a diary that have then been reassembled for display by the artist. Indecipherable messages dance across the fabric, like a secret alphabet, mimicking the linear flow of writing across a page, but ultimately remaining completely illegible to the viewer. Alongside the rhythmical lines of flowing ‘text’, lengths of loose thread dangle from the sheets, their presence suggesting not only the unravelling or disintegration of the ‘writing,’ but also hinting at the words unspoken, the stories that remain untold and unrecorded, and thus immaterial.
The connection between the bedsheet, sewing and writing had deep roots in Lai’s childhood memories: ‘As a child, every time I saw my grandmother mending … I would tell her, “These sheets are written” and she would reply, “Read them.” I invented stories suggested [to] me by the movements of the tangled thread’ (Lai, quoted in E. Pontiggia, Maria Lai: Art and Connection, 2017, p. 151). By consciously leaving the text illegible, the stitching merely suggestive of words and lines written on a page, Lai imbues the artwork with the potential for infinite meanings. Deliberately enigmatic and impenetrable, they can be interpreted differently by each individual who encounters them, thus allowing the sheets to become a site for endless creation and imagination, as viewers construct their own fantastical narratives from the ‘pages’ before them. At the same time, these indecipherable messages point to the fallibility of writing as a means of communication, comprehensible only to those who understand the laws and logic of the system, thus highlighting its inherent exclusivity as a method of recording and story telling.
The connection between the bedsheet, sewing and writing had deep roots in Lai’s childhood memories: ‘As a child, every time I saw my grandmother mending … I would tell her, “These sheets are written” and she would reply, “Read them.” I invented stories suggested [to] me by the movements of the tangled thread’ (Lai, quoted in E. Pontiggia, Maria Lai: Art and Connection, 2017, p. 151). By consciously leaving the text illegible, the stitching merely suggestive of words and lines written on a page, Lai imbues the artwork with the potential for infinite meanings. Deliberately enigmatic and impenetrable, they can be interpreted differently by each individual who encounters them, thus allowing the sheets to become a site for endless creation and imagination, as viewers construct their own fantastical narratives from the ‘pages’ before them. At the same time, these indecipherable messages point to the fallibility of writing as a means of communication, comprehensible only to those who understand the laws and logic of the system, thus highlighting its inherent exclusivity as a method of recording and story telling.