Dinah Prentice, Piecing

8 June - 24 August 2018

Throughout her life Dinah Prentice has explored the concept of piecing together fragments. Working with fabric, canvas, text or paper, she sutures materials that have otherwise been fractured or divided.

The works in this exhibition marked the beginning of Prentice’s commitment to a radical feminist enquiry as an alternative approach to the avant-garde art historical canon. Through the necessity of sewing together fabric scraps in order to create a new canvas, Prentice underwent a discovery of the potential for the pieced fabric to become the surface itself.

Developing on earlier works and experiments, Prentice began to produce large-scale pieced and sewn constructions in the late 1970s. Dramatic tapestry-like works, architectural in scale, originated in parallel to the wider second-wave feminist movement and its reclamation of textiles and craft - traditionally inscribed and gendered as ‘women’s work’ - in order to create new modes of avant-garde artistic production.

Born in London and trained at Birmingham College of Art before attending the Royal Academy Schools, Dinah Prentice developed a long standing affinity with Birmingham. First exhibiting at the University in 1964, around this time she was also one of the founders of internationally renowned Ikon gallery. This exhibition brings together early key works from that period for the first time with Laced Threads, a site-specific installation created by the artist in 2004.