Fabric of Childhood –
2021

 

Solo exhibition at Inda Gallery Budapest in 2021.

Curated by: Zsolt Kozma

"Emerging artist Eszter Metzing captured the eyes of professionals as well as the public with her large embroidered graphic textile, titled Belső kert (Inner Garden), she made as her diploma work at the Department of Graphics of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2018. Her artistic practice is rooted in a kind of meditation exercise, exploring the influence of the conscious and of thinking on the psyche. Her experimentative mindset, as well as her curiosity, are indispensable for this kind of inquiries, and the same openness and flexibility also characterise her use of materials and techniques.
One of her signature techniques is embroidery, which places a planned monotonous series of movements of the hand in a permanent interplay with improvisation, resulting in a dialogue shaped by the accidental. Textiles, surfaces embroidered, processed or destructed, meet with figural shapes, simplified forms that only stimulate sensations – in the space of the intangibility of there-being (dasein).

Continuing the investigations of the relations of the conscious and the subconscious she embarked on in her diploma work, Inner Garden, in this exhibition, Metzing advances further and deeper in exploring the influence of our childhood and early memories on our adult identity, consciousness and being. In her own words, she seeks answers to three questions:

-        How, in what form, are childhood experiences present in our adult life?
-        To what extent do these experiences influence our present?
-        To what extent are we aware of these memories and their influences?

In her pursuit for answers, Metzing uses her works to turn the showroom into an intimate space. Rather than evoking the ambience of a children’s room, she aims to induce an indelineable space experience in the viewer – an experience that can stimulate reflexes, trigger memories and associations. Her works are based on her childhood, or rather, on early memories as seen from her present. These memories blend together into surreal scenes, recalling thoughts, emotions and sensations deposited in her psyche during her childhood, and still there in her conscious-subconscious self today. Through her artistic research, Metzing also offers her past and present as a case study to probe theories on the effects of positive or negative childhood experiences, small or major traumas affect our lives later." 
/Zsolt Kozma, 2021/

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Eszter Metzing © 2022

eszter.metzing@gmail.com
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