Exhibition: The Blue Afar at the Thames Art Gallery

Short Summary: My latest exhibition at Thames Art Gallery explores the longing of distance through two immersive blue embroidered installations.

Date: January 2024

The Blue Afar opened at Thames Art Gallery on January 26, 2024. Running through March 24, 2024, this solo exhibition featured two major installations that explored the physiological, cultural, and metaphorical meanings of the colour blue through my embroidered sculptural practice. The exhibition, curated by guest curator Matthew Ryan Smith, opened during Chatham’s Winter ARTcrawl. Creating The Blue Afar was an exploration of how embroidered environments can express the infinitesimal breadth of human emotions and shape our relationship to earth and sky.

The exhibition takes its name from Rebecca Solnit’s observation in A Field Guide to Getting Lost: “The world is blue at its edges and in its depths.” She writes of being moved by “the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away.”

Blue exists in the most distant places: where the horizon meets the sky, in ocean depths, at the edges of our vision. Solnit suggests that blue is not just a colour but an emotion—”the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in.” This concept became the foundation for the work: How do we materialize the beauty of distance while maintaining its essential quality of being forever beyond our grasp?

Far Away Blue Fields

The largest installation attempts to materialize the blue of distance itself. A constellation of powder blue orbs resembling cumulus clouds floated above a vista of azure flowers suspended from the gallery ceiling by tiny threads. The flowers swayed with air currents, creating a living field of blue that permeated the viewer’s entire visual field.

This work deliberately closed the physical distance between us and the edges of the world—bringing the place where earth meets sky into intimate proximity. By saturating the space with blue, I hoped to manifest the beauty of the horizon’s edge up close, yet still just out of reach.

The Horizon, The Ocean, The Sky

The companion wall installation featured an immense gathering of embroidered blue leaves, weeds, birds, and bees—a biological archive rendered entirely in thread, wool roving, organza, linen, and pins. Positioned in the gallery’s smallest space, this piece invited viewers to move amongst natural objects and remember that we are not only in nature but of nature.