The Tie That Binds

Written on the occasion of Grace Cross’ solo exhibition, MOTHER IS A DRUM, at Smith Studio, July 2019.

“Here is a red thread. Crimson red, like blood. Placenta red, menstrual red, nipple-sucked-raw red. The shade of birth and death, and of life in between – the shade of passion and shame, love and rage. The colour of warning and good fortune, of fire and fertility. A colour analogous to the warm dark cave of the womb. As in the body, so too in the earth – vermillion clay, russet ochre, iron oxide. And above, in the sky, in dawn’s scarlet and dusk’s magenta, at the far end of the colour spectrum, at the rainbow’s apex: red. It is a colour that belongs as much to the exterior world as the interior, to the real as to the symbolic. A colour saturated with meaning, with metaphorical import. Potent and charged with the significance we lend it. And there, the thread, tracing its red line across the canvas.”

View the catalogue and accompanying essay here.