WHO COUNTS THE STEPS OF THE SUN

LIAM LEE + ELISABETH PERRAULT

OPENING SEPTEMBER 19, 6—9PM

ON VIEW SEPTEMBER 20 – NOVEMBER 2, 2024

CARVALHO PARK announces the opening of Who Counts the Steps of the Sun, featuring ascendent New York-based, American artist and designer, Liam Lee, with Montréal-based ceramic and textile artist, Elisabeth Perrault. The exhibition introduces the work of Perrault through two architecturally-scaled, yet delicate, installations – one of ceramic flowers in a suspended moment of decay, their stems in long silk cocoons, draped from the rafters of the gallery. Her second work Peau de fleurs, undulates across the gallery walls, an unfolding mass of the finest threads. Lee, known for his expansive and complex mohair tapestries, introduces his largest works to date. Who Counts the Steps of the Sun, which opens the evening of September 19, is accompanied by the text below by United Kingdom-based curator, Dr. Rebecca Birrell.

What might be seen, sensed and – ultimately – learnt in a garden? In the work of Lee and Perrault, the garden is at once a subject, a source of beauty, spirituality and knowledge, and a metaphor for the creative process. A garden offers rich visual information as much as haptic, aural and olfactory pleasures, condensing into a single space the diverse, expansive aliveness of the natural world. Arguably, the one dimensionality of painting struggles to capture the sensuousness of these environments. Lee and Perrault transcend these limits through work in textile and sculpture, volume and tactility, to more closely align the phenomenological qualities of plant-life.

For both Lee and Perrault, tapestry is the chosen medium for approaching organisms and the ecosystems in which they dwell. In Lee’s mohair tapestries, rendered in carefully dyed vibrantly colored felt, density and weight are subtly engineered to convey biomorphic life. Sinuous lines and ovoids float in arrangements that carry movement and sentience. These abstract forms suggest numerous possible concrete correlatives: moss, mold, mushrooms, seeds, and roots are just some of the flora, fauna and fungus that might be glimpsed in Lee’s works. This is the forest floor, or a nearby pond seen from above – as from a hovering insect – with forms of life wriggling underneath its surface. Some tapestries exhibit a color palette without automatic associations to conventional nature motifs: a luminous orange-red ground is cut across by a ribbon of violet; a long undulating line of turquoise runs through a base of charcoal, freckled by violet circles grouped together like unusual berries. Others explicitly invite comparison with landscape: ropes of khaki and emerald against taupe evoke a wooded habitat; whites connote bleached stone, clouds and trodden snow. Lee’s allusions are agile, ambiguous, one set of impressions quickly yielding to another with alterations of perspective. Contractions and dilations of scale reveal other worlds. Adjust your eyes, and the same tapestries become topographical maps. Or bacteria under a microscope.

Perrault’s tapestry permits a similarly plural vision. At a distance, Peau de Fleurs appears abstract, a shimmering wedge of pastel thread. On closer study, lush floral arrangements reminiscent of Impressionist landscapes come into view. Affinities are drawn between fabric and organic matter – segments of pink thread have the weight of drooping petals; shades of green describe hedges, stems and leaves, and give a sense of their feel to touch. Threads from each flower move in all directions out to neighboring flowers, as though marking the flightpath of a pollinating bee, stressing the interconnectedness of botanic life. Yet Perrault complicates this Edenic image through the shape and placement of the tapestry, which hugs the wall like a large patch of mold. Perrault playfully alludes to different value judgments of analogous natural processes: a garden filled with flowers is considered fertile, abundant; a wall blighted by a mold, a contamination.

Lee compares felting his tapestries to drawing. Similarly, Perrault describes ‘painting with fabric’ as the method of Peau de Fleurs. But might gardening be an alternative metaphor? Gardens demand a form of slow, patient self-expression that must remain open to surprise, to the essential wildness of the medium of living things. Tapestry in particular shares something of the gardener’s ethos and available tools, as both rely on the skill and ingenuity of the hand. As Lee explains, tapestry is a gradual, additive process that encourages image-making that is more about an organic emergence of a form, an unfolding or an unspooling, than a fixed plan and realization. What emerges in Lee’s tapestries is a visual language of circular and linear shapes that draws on garden philosophies from outside the Western European tradition. Lee cites the Japanese Zen gardens as a point of reference, metaphysical spaces in which mental rather than simply physical movement is encouraged. Designed to spark contemplation, these landscapes are intended to transmit a higher knowledge to their visitors, to be experienced as sites of enlightenment. Lee’s tapestries share this meditative atmosphere, and like the Zen garden, are an invitation to stillness. 

If Lee’s tapestries represent a restorative vision of paradise, then Perrault envisages something more unpredictable, at once whimsical and uncanny. Perrault’s Sunflowers, a series of ceramic and fiber sculptures, extend the horizons of her work’s gently surreal floral embrace. Outsized sunflowers are suspended from the ceiling in wayward poses, their stems and petals frayed. Perrault figures organic decay, which can be observed in flowers as wilting – a reorientation from sky to ground – by way of a representation of gravity. Across the early history of still life painting, flowers symbolize mortality, warning against the ephemerality of human life with arrangements whose beauty always possesses a dark edge. Perrault alludes to this tradition but rejects its pessimistic outlook. In these sculptures, decomposition is not grim, but a chance to honor the beauty and complexity of each living thing.

The sunflowers are composed of broken pieces of ceramic wrapped in silk and mesh, sewn intricately together with colored thread. The results are imposing presences with densely textured surfaces characterized by small details that draw the eye. Thread is looped across nodes of ceramic with the delicacy of a spider’s web, or it is spiraled into tight patterns that resemble lichen. Patches of exposed mesh imitate a plant’s fibrous interior. Long multicolored stems coil on the ground, their hefty materiality giving them a fleshly aspect, no less animate than the tail of an animal. Above all, it is the human-animal that comes to mind amongst these sculptures given the anthropomorphic qualities of Perrault’s sunflowers. The vocabulary of human anatomy feels more relevant to these works than botany: their necks are slack, their heads dangle, their faces are turned from us with an air of despondency.

As both Perrault and Lee use estrangement strategies – such as abstraction, or surrealism – to state the constructedness of nature, its status as an idea or fiction draws from a human perspective. Yet in aligning animal, mineral and vegetable, as Perrault and Lee achieve in different ways, these works gesture towards a multi-species order of relations that acknowledges human embeddedness and indebtedness to the natural world.

Liam Lee (b. 1993, New York) is an American artist and designer based in New York whose work is concerned with the dissolution of the boundary between interior and exterior space, between man-made objects and what constitutes the natural environment. In 2023, Lee’s work was included in the group exhibition “Conversation Pieces” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His most recent solo exhibitions were held at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine, and Patrick Parrish Gallery in New York. He was a finalist of the LOEWE Craft Prize in 2023 which culminated in an exhibition at the Noguchi Museum in Queens. His work is currently featured in “Objects: USA” at R & Company’s American Design Triennial, and in “Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial” at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, which opens in November. Group exhibitions include those with CARVALHO PARK, New York; Kiaf SEOUL with CARVALHO PARK, Seoul; Salon Art & Design, New York; FOG Design + Art, San Francisco; Nomad Circle, Capri; Art021 Shanghai; and at Make Hauser and Wirth. His work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Denver Art Museum.           

Elisabeth Perrault (b. 1996, Joliette, Canada) is a textile and ceramic artist living and working in Montréal. Perrault is currently pursuing her MFA at Concordia University in Montréal, where she completed her BA in 2020. Perrault is working towards two upcoming solo exhibitions at Maison de la culture de Maisonneuve, Montréal, and CIRCA Art Actuel, Montréal. Her most recent solo exhibition was held at Maison des Arts et de la Culture de Bromptonville in Quebec (2024), and her work has been the subject of two solo shows with Galerie Pangée in Montréal (2023 + 2021). This summer, she was a resident at the Baie-Saint-Paul Symposium in Québec (2024), and last year she received the prestigious Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2023). Her work has been included in numerous international group exhibitions including Margot Samel Gallery, New York (2024); Arusha Gallery, London (2023); Segrete Tracce di Memoria, Genoa, Italy, (2022); and La Conserverie, Marrakech (2021). Her work was recently acquired by the Contemporary Art Museum of Baie-Saint-Paul in Quebec.