The Story: Threadings

Storyboard and statement for Spring 2023 Parlour & Ramp exhibition Threadings exploring storytelling in contemporary art.

The oldest methods of human communication took non-verbal form. Cave paintings, gestures, facial expressions, and guttural sound. Across millenia, we have developed pattern systems for recognizing the emotion of a color, the sound of a feeling, and have since codified a kind of unifying visual lexicon as a means of connecting across generations.

We continue to evolve as a species of artists and communicators, to convey the nuances of the human experience through an ever expanding variety of media.

Threadings is a body of work in conversation with the progression of how we engage storytelling in the modern day.

What are the subtler narratives of our lives? What intimate details of our collective and individual histories, cultures, and identities can be found in the texture of a painting or the shape of a line? 

This body of work, titled after and inspired by the storytelling of culture worker and essayist, Ismatu Gwendolyn is an invitation to reflect on where we find ourselves situated in the dialogue between humanity’s capacity for self-expression and the limits of our physical forms. If we can contend with the boundaries of our perception across (and between) lines of race, class, or nationality and interrogate how our gaze is colored by the stories we are told, or tell ourselves, there is infinite possibility to expand how we engage art, society, and ourselves.

Herein you will find a visual presentation of three dimensional sculpture and traditional illustration with a particular emphasis on personal narratives, fictional/folklorish themes, and the abstraction of memory.

May you leave with a word, image, or memory in mind that shapes what becomes of your story.

“The Calf” (2025)
Acrylic, collage on polytab

As seen in Threadings
by Ahmad George