Jacquard woven throw/blanket
Dimensions 220 x 160 cms
Limited Edition of 28

£450 (+ cost of package and post)

ABOUT THE WORK
This Artists Throw is Yelena Popova’s initial sketch for a large jacquard woven stage curtain for Solway Hall community centre in Whitehaven, produced as part of a new public art commissions programme ‘Deep Time: Commissions for the Lake District Coast.’

The ‘Ray Cat’ is a proposition by the philosophers Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri, which responds to the problem of how to alert inhabitants of the earth thousands of years from now to the existence of nuclear waste in a particular location. They proposed to alter the DNA of domestic cats so they would change colour when exposed to radiation.

Popova’s design takes inspiration from the 16th-century millefleurs tapestry ‘Hunting Scene with a Unicorn’ held at the V&A collection in London. The Ray Cat, currently as mythological as the Unicorn, plays in a post- industrial landscape filled with pipes, electricity sockets, electromagnetic waves and the remains of UK’s first nuclear facility. The overall pattern is formed by merging zig-zag and wavy lines, which represent the Cumbrian mountains and the sea.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Yelena Popova works across a range of media, including painting, tapestry, video and installation. She lives and works in Nottingham, UK.

Her work was included in Slow Painting curated by Martin Herbert for Hayward Gallery touring programme (2019) and in Vitamin P3 (New Perspectives in Painting) published by Phaidon (2016). She was shortlisted for the Arts Foundation Award in Painting and was included in 100 Painters of Tomorrow published by Thames and Hudson (2014). Yelena has attended a number of residencies, among them Girton College; The Art House, Wakefield; CCA Andratx, Mallorca. Recent solo exhibitions include: Landscapes of Power, Philipp von Rosen, Cologne; The Scholar Stones Project, Holden Gallery, Manchester (2020); Her Name is Prometheus, L’etranger, London; Townlets, Art House Wakefield (2018); After Image, Nottingham Contemporary (2016) and Unsensed, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle (2015). 

Hunting Scene with a Ray Cat was produced on the occasion of Yelena Popova’s exhibition MADE GROUND at CAMPLE LINE, 1 October – 11 December 2022

If you have any questions about Yelena’s Artists’ Throw, please contact us at info@campleline.org.uk