Kirsten Farrell’s new exhibition Future Ghosts uses found plastic to make textiles that are layered and stitched. In this work, Farrell proposes that plastic should be re-evaluated as precious, honouring the materials aesthetic value through laborious craft-based processes. In abstract compositions, Farrell challenges the ongoing associations of textile as feminine and painting as masculine, creating works that are both familiar and unexpected.

In Future Ghosts language is a key area of investigation. The work draws on quotes gleaned from song lyrics and authors including Ursula K. Le Guin, Martha Wainwright, Nick Cave and Rachel Cusk. Phrases share thematic threads of time, ghosts, mystery and uncertainty. These words removed from their original sources and mixed in together, laid over incidental printed words on the plastic itself, become another kind of abstraction. The text is both a way in for viewers and an opening out of meaning as the words and plastic colour fields intermingle.

Farrell’s artistic practice involves making works while listening to novels and podcasts, or watching television. This method of making involves a constant inundation in a sea of words and thoughts, in many languages and modes. Ideas jostle for attention and are channelled into the work, without hierarchy, allowing them to coexist with the materiality of plastics. In this new exhibition, the artist questions the clear limitations of language to explain or emulate ideas and meaning found in art.

Future Ghosts is an exploration of artists and the traces they leave in the world. The ghosts are writers and writings. They are plastics that will haunt us for thousands of years to come, which are already haunting us. They are memories and portents, strange things brought into being, difficult or even impossible to explain.