Textile artist Mia Bilbeisi explores the porous relationship between the body and domestic interiors. Combining painterly techniques with sculptural forms, she works with salvaged textiles, using staining, slicing and structural reconfiguration to transform familiar materials.

Bilbeisi’s practice embraces the stain as a permanent disruption, exploring the tension between the pristine and the polluted, and between comfort and discomfort. Through soaking materials and layering translucent fabrics, fluid colours and textures blur the boundaries between object, body and space.

During her residency at Aspex, Bilbeisi will bring together two strands of her practice: soft sculpture and large-scale textile painting. Working with recycled domestic fabrics stretched and soaked over wooden structures, she will explore ways of moving her paintings beyond the wall and into three-dimensional space, creating freestanding works that become bodies in their own right.

The residency will also provide an opportunity for Bilbeisi to explore how the work can evolve through interaction with Aspex’s communities. Visitors are invited to contribute to, mark, paint or physically alter elements of the work, allowing the pieces to transform throughout the residency and reflecting Bilbeisi’s ongoing interest in bodily presence, materiality and mark-making.

Please note: This is a residency at Aspex and therefore not an actual event with strict times.