Ptolemy Mann

Britain
B. 1972

‘Colour is my obsession. Through a unique process of extremely refined hand dyeing and weaving I have been able to capture powerful ‘colourfields’ within a constructed surface. Each thread echo’s a painted line. Intelligent colour theory underpins an emotional exploration of intuitive colour.’

‘Colour is my obsession. Through a unique process of extremely refined hand dyeing and weaving I have been able to capture powerful ‘colourfields’ within a constructed surface. Each thread echo’s a painted line. Intelligent colour theory underpins an emotional exploration of intuitive colour.’

Ptolemy Mann’s unique approach to hand dyeing and weaving wall-based, architectural art works has become the basis for a modern-day Bauhaus philosophy of art making and design underpinned with intelligent colour theory. Having developed a unique approach to creating her work over a twenty-five-year period, Mann recently developed a new series entitled Thread Painting as she explores the relationship between paint and textile. In this series, warp threads of the ground cloth are hand dyed and woven on the loom and then stretched over a frame. A further application of acrylic paint onto the finished surface results in a gestural colour field that contrasts with the linear woven ground. The result is a merging of the ‘soak stain painting’ technique of the Abstract Expressionist movement with a Bauhaus vision of art making through craftmanship.

Breaking the ‘rules’ of both weaving and painting, the brushstrokes in Thread Painting are, according to Ann Coxon, curator at the Tate Modern, loaded with paint and with meaning. ‘They may be seen as a violent obliteration of the woven surface, yet the paint adds more colour, sitting in juxtaposition and harmony with the woven ground, sometimes soaking and bleeding into the fibres, sometimes appearing to float on top. Dyed colour and applied colour sit together, complicating the distinction between structure and surface, the woven and the painted, the thread and the trace.’ Placing her work in a historical context, Coxon writes that ‘painting and weaving come with their historical baggage, necessarily inflecting our understanding of the work. But Mann’s thread paintings also have their own seductive beauty and materiality into which they invite us to become immersed.’

Ptolemy Mann has exhibited widely and received solo exhibitions in the US, UK, Switzerland and Germany. She has completed many site-specific installations including Circadian Rhythm – a commission for the 9th floor restaurant in the Blavatnik building at the Tate Modern, London and has published her first monograph entitled Thread Painting.

Ptolemy Mann lives and works in Britain.

WORK AVAILABLE