‍ ‍

Projects Kavel Raffety Margate UK

The exhibition ‘weaver’ presents the large scale textile installation Princess Pyramid alongside related developmental and contextual works - smaller textile pieces and drawings on cloth.

Beginning from an auto-ethnographic position, this work extends beyond personal experience to consider a universal human connection. We all have a mother, whether we know her or not, whether the relationship is close or difficult. The real or imagined relationship occupies profound psychological space.

The photograph, taken in the late 1960s, places my mother at its centre, surrounded by female family members—mothers across generations. I appear as a small child seated on the floor to the right.

Now, as a grown woman, I enter into a posthumous conversation with my mother, attempting to bridge the distance between then and now, not knowing and knowing, between her and me. Through weaving, I hold conversations with the dead and construct new understandings in cloth.

In this process of questioning and searching, an umbilical cord is extended across the planet and through metaphysical space, connecting past and present, absence and presence.

Throughout my practice, I have drawn upon my working-class family history, heritage, and relationships, particularly my relationship with my mother. Like the photographer Richard Billingham, I was initially reluctant to reveal the personal origins of my work, but over time I came to recognise the richness and significance of these lived experiences.

My relationship with my family, and especially with my absent mother, became fractured when my parents and only sibling emigrated to the United States while I was in my early twenties—a period when global communication was far less immediate and accessible than it is today.

This symbolic bereavement initiated a long-term exploration of loss, memory, and preservation, alongside an ongoing questioning of our enduring relationship with the person who first gave us life: our mother.