Wallflowers - last weekend
Dear friends,
We would like to invite you to come see the last Arcway exhibition of 2020, Wallflowers by Anna Munk and Aia Sofia Turan Coverley. Wallflowers will be open this Saturday and Sunday from 13-17. Down below is a text by Anna Stahn about the exhibition which we hope you will enjoy.
Merry christmas and a happy new year, Arcway.
*A Romantic Tradition - Written by Anna Stahn for Wallflowers *
How embarrassing: that she didn’t notice her friend had kept an entire universe in her flat front pocket, in the stucco of her kitchen, all these years.
She could just have listened, when her friend, the other queen slammed the door, then she could have casted a glance at the door’s ornamentation, where the cosmos sat quietly with its little hum of infinity, craft and trippy mathematics. She too had a cosmos in her pocket; its ornamentation was duller with a plant, a famous man or a little bird.
It turned out the two queens had the exact same habit; they would both draw for hours, and what they would draw would be systems; folding food things or flowers with their fingers.
They would both sit close up against the wall: Quiet queens disappearing into the wallpaper their pencils swinging back and forward. When they had become one with the surface of flowers and lines, the small table they had been sitting at broke, free from its pose, shook of the drawings and ran across the room’s Loubution red walls; patterns of poppies repeating the cosmic and the cute.
I stepped into the room to get a good look at the drawings now sprinkled, planted, cast as stones on the floor, the little table pet circulated around me in a score, the vulnerable queens sat inside the wallpaper somewhere, looking out at me from inside the drawings.
Some of the drawings hissed of quiet vibrant fields at evening time. Moist fields; a red lily pad floated close to my ankles and my feet got wet just from looking at the them; pastels, powdery, rouge. Each of my feet became exactly as wet as the other, there were not a drops difference, it was a symmetry of drops.
These drawings must have come from a swamp or a field of some kind, with a wet underbelly, a little waterhole surrounded by a narcissus bed; where one’s self-obsession can be fed until one turns into a lily leaf.
And don’t even get me started on sunflowers! Yellow, thin long legged beings, growing in a field eating you up, yes - being transformed or eaten by beauty.
There was also a different beauty at stake. A cosmos originating from the other queens pocket; a cosmos the size of a village drawn by a sculptor’s hand, the hand belonging to vulnerable queen the second. Drawings molded and folded, a beauty of a dryer landscape, a warmer cosmos.
The table pet still circulated, shook of the drops of rainwater.
This other cosmos existed even in math tasks, games and cooking. It was not the language of the landscape but the language of what took place in the landscape. An entire language constructed for speaking without words.
When drawing from a chair in the kitchen, the women’s room, it was the ornamentation of Manti (paper like pasta) being folded (quick!) like origami papers this queen would draw, she would draw them with her fingers, fold and repeat almost infinitely, a tradition, a discipline, a craft she had kept in her pocket since always.
She too had flowers: a scarf with a floral print. She had put it on the table as a cloth, as a decoration one could say.