The Thousands

They’re both on now and they’re both woven, but there’s little else these bilums have in common with Janet Echelman’s (quite wonderful) Tsunami 1.26, the giant lace piece of high tensile rope woven in the sky outside Town Hall that’s starring in Art & About. One is public art, one is a community fundraiser. One is site specific and up for a limited time; the other can be carried with you wherever you go and will, according to anecdotal evidence, last a decade at least.

Damien Minton Gallery is putting on a show that has been made by the women of the Paigatasa region in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The exhibition is a showcase of carefully and skilfully made, striking pieces of work, and is also a means of raising funds via the sale of useful goods for a mother and child health clinic in a region where childbirth still has a high mortality rate. The bilums are functional, durable, colourful, and manage – via the unironic incorporation of brand logos as decorative motifs – to completely fuck with both mass branding and critiques of it. Ethnographise THAT.