Having been impressed by Barrada's abstract textile compositions which I encountered at Pace's excellent Creating Abstraction staged two years ago in the gallery (here), an excellent exhibition about the female contribution to the global abstract movements in art, I felt I had to visit this solo show to find out more about this aspect of her practice. I recently posted about the current textile show at Barbican, Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art (here), which originally featured a couple of Barrada's textile appliques but due to a political decision by those at Barbican that exhibition appears itself to be unravelling with Barrada along with other artists deciding to withdraw their work in protest. The works on display here are mainly created using the textile technique of appliqué in which pieces of cloth are sewn onto a larger piece to create a picture or pattern. There are different fabrics employed such as rich velvets which have a lustrous sheen and reflect the light beautifully creating a new dimension and dynamic to the pieces. I like the fact that certain edges of fabric are left frayed adding further levels of texture. There are also cloths which have been dyed in 'The Mothership' Barrada's natural dye garden and studio situated in Tangier. We encounter blues created from indigo leaves like woad, reds and pinks extracted from madder roots, and oranges and yellows from plants such as pomegranate and weld. These are fixed into the fabric with a mordant - a substance which gives the dyed fabric better light-fastness and durability. "Mordant" means to bite, or biting in French hence the title of the exhibition. These fabrics have a lovely range of colours some very bold, others subtly nuanced. Walking through the exhibition I thought it possible to detect a range of credible influences on these works such as Rothko's fuzzy colour fields, the geometry of Constructivism, as well as hard-edge abstract geometry. One could even perhaps detect an influence from the textile pieces of Louise Bourgois. The ways in which the various cloth elements are laid down create a certain rhythm and surface tension in the pieces which has the eye darting back and forth finding patterns. There are some lovely little fabric samples set in blocks of clear perspex which refract the the light playing optical tricks on the eye. Barrada shows just like the other artists who work in textiles at the Barbican's Unravel exhibition across town just how important fabric can be as a medium for artistic expression.
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