Patternity: Pattern
Power – Superstripe
Londonnewcastle
Gallery, Redchurch Street. Until 21 April
Have you ever thought about the cultural value of patterns?
Have you looked at an electricity pylon, a stair railing or a zebra crossing and
seen beyond the mundane to perceive the aesthetic enticement of visually ordered
beauty? Or thought about how patterns make our world comprehensible, navigable
and supremely elegant?
Well if not, you might after you’ve been to Patternity’s Pattern Power – Superstripe festival.
They take the ethos of their award-winning cultural exploration of pattern – to
find and celebrate the pattern in everything – and manifest it as a vibrant, hypnotic and wonderfully miscellaneous series of workshops, talks and exhibitions.
This particular festival is all about stripes. When you enter, your
retinas will be seared with more monochrome linear tessellations than you ever
thought possible. The exhibition titillates your visual taste buds (to mix a metaphor as much as they mix up their curation) across a
range of stripey subjects; from rigid diagonal lines swathing a curvaceous naked
form in the work of fashion photographer Sølve Sundsbø to Soulwax's Any Minute Now album cover, whose title recedes
into impenetrable vertical stripes if you stand straight on but becomes blindingly
clear when you to move to the side (and addles your brain in the process).
The festival appeals to our natural human tendency to
aphonenia (recognising patterns that don’t exist – that face you thought you could see when you
last looked up at the clouds). Patternity doesn’t just explore visual patterns,
but through myriad events it delves into patterns in music, psychology, space,
nature and even health and wellbeing. The beauty of patterns, be they gratifyingly
symmetrical or enthrallingly chaotic, is celebrated in every way, down to the
stripy mint humbugs scattered around the curated shop. The founders Anna Murray
and Grace Withingham believe that their work can help alter patterns of
the mind:
As human beings we can get stuck into very negative ways of thinking. Becoming more aware of these “bad” patterns can help us to work on replacing them with more positive ones. Good patterns of thought and behaviour encourage more healthy ways of being in the world — surely the most enduring of excellent patterns to discover!
Thus the festival even encompasses yoga, meditation and soothing
conversations over a cup of Patternitea. So whether it is the banality of a
barcode, the jauntiness of a sailor top or the ethereality of Saturnalian
rings, stripes are everywhere - and Patternity streaks its way into your head like a monochrome mirage that confounds your eyes and stimulates your brain in equal measure. Check out their stuff here.
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