Offsite9: Alignment - Kathleen Fabre
Kathleen Fabre is a conceptual artist with an interdisciplinary practice. Alignment sees a series of four site-specific architectural scale wool installations. The temporary installations form vast symbols of hope and each piece acts as a colourful welcome to visitors and residents.
Can you explain your initial ideas for Alignment?
My idea stemmed from a desire to make contemporary conceptual art accessible to a wider audience through a series of public artworks with positive meaning. Alignment sees a series of four vibrant site-specific architectural scale neon rainbow wool installations created utilising the existing infrastructure around Wolverhampton city centre. These make many connections to form vast symbols of hope and diversity.
Can you say more about the materials and symbols you’re using?
I will be using a single material; super chunky neon wool. I love how I can use this simple material to explore and create artworks on an architectural scale. The wool essentially allows me to draw in space. I chose a neon rainbow colour palette for its vibrancy against the environments they will inhabit, but fundamentally the rainbow holds the most positive symbolism I know, with many interpretations and I am open to all of these. Rainbows are a symbol of hope and peace in many cultures and religions and a promise of better times to come. The rainbow is a long-standing symbol of LGBTQI+ pride; a sign of solidarity and support for diversity. My reconnection to and love of nature also plays a part: when a rainbow appears in the sky it always captures and delights me. Nature’s beautiful linear illusion is all about light.
How does Alignment connect to the works you have made before or made recently?
At the start of the pandemic I created a rainbow wool installation, Daily Exercise, on home turf utilising the lamppost outside my front garden. It was my contribution to the rainbow walk that had developed as a result of the first lockdown, and later adopted as a thank you to the NHS. Alignment is a progression of that idea and an exploration of space on a far bigger scale. I’ve been creating temporary site-specific installations since 2009. I love to explore space and light and am often drawn to architectural voids as spaces to exhibit, the spaces in-between, and to spaces we cannot touch feel or stand in.
How do you hope audiences will engage with your project in its different sites? What do you hope they will get from the work?
My intention for the series of installations is to capture the public’s attention at each site. My aim is for each piece to act as a colourful greeting to visitors, commuters, residents as they arrive into or walk around the city centre, and if only for a moment to make people smile and wonder. The titles of each installation reveal a connection to its location, suggesting a meaning for the work and why the site was chosen. Read Between the Lines, for example, utilises the trees outside Wolverhampton Central Library. The titles also hint at the process I undertake to create them such as Making Connections and Lines of Enquiry. My hope is the symbolism of the rainbow will connect to people in a positive way, however they may interpret its meaning. I hope the work will bring people together to provoke questions and conversations between each other. During a dark period of history, an ongoing global pandemic, environment crisis and great division and discrimination throughout the world, I feel we all need signs of hope for the future.