IMPARATICCI

MANDY BONNELL

EAGLE GALLERY CABINET ROOM

15 September – 8 October 2021

Mandy Bonnell’s work is a contemporary response to the art of self-taught, often anonymous Eighteenth and Nineteenth century women who produced botanicals, herbariums, watercolours, embroideries and lace; through practices frequently dismissed as feminine leisure activities. Drawing inspiration from a variety of international sources, Bonnell’s artist’s books, works on paper and prints have variously celebrated the Victorian botanist Miss Rowe of Liverpool, the collage artist Mary Delaney and the hand-printed textile patterns of the Kenyan Archipelago of Lamu.

Her solo exhibition Imparaticci focusses on a unique artist’s book that is a meditation on the craft of lace making. Inspired by research into the ‘white work’ embroidery collection held at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in NYC and the domestic lace samplers at the Museo del Merletto, Venice; the recent work combines pin-prick and pencil drawing, with tiny areas of collage, in addition to minutely detailed botanical studies.

Bonnell’s motifs refer both to lace pattern templates that are pricked with intricate details taken from nature and the repetitive rhythms of stitching, reflected in the work as tiny pencil marks. Imparaticci alludes to a colloquial Italian term for ‘learning about’ (and sometimes mending), a domestic task. The durational activity – of the meticulous making and mending of lace – is conveyed by the frayed edges of the book’s pages that have been ‘repaired’ by tiny collage patches.

Bonnell’s artist’s books were featured in Yale Center for British Art’s seminal exhibition Of Green Leaf Bird and Flower (2014) and her books and prints are held in collections including: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; British High Commission, Nairobi, Kenya; Special Collections, British Library, London; FIL, London; Minnesota Center for Book Arts, USA; New York Public Library, NY, USA; Rahimtullah Museum of Modern Art, Nairobi, Kenya; Victoria & Albert Museum, London and Yale Center for British Art, USA.

A catalogue with texts by Charles Darwent and Emma Hill published for the exhibition by EMH Arts, London, is available from the gallery.

Mandy Bonnell – Imparaticci, 2021

Imparaticci drawings catalogue

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MANDY BONNELL Honeycomb Lace no. 1, 2021
Honeycomb Lace no. 1, 2021
MANDY BONNELL Honeycomb Lace no. 2, 2021
Honeycomb Lace no. 2, 2021
MANDY BONNELL Honeycomb Lace no. 3, 2021
Honeycomb Lace no. 3, 2021