Notions of childhood innocence are picked up in Tisna Westerhof’s Once in a Blue Moon series of idyllic scenes, treasured memories painted in deep blue onto odd shaped, gold rimmed panels.
The distinctive colour is repeated throughout a lot of Westerhof’s work. With an added sense of danger nothing is what it appears at first sight. What from a distance looks like a decorative arrangement of vintage porcelain dishes, on closer inspection turns into a collection of disposable picnic plates depicting scenes of police brutality, civil unrest and protest all too familiar from current news bulletins; nearby motifs of playing children are superimposed onto urban landscapes and polluted rivers, repeated ad infinitum across traditional Delft Blue tiles.
Westerhof’s heart shaped Alphabet Hankies, too, provide a more sinister guide to learning the alphabet, ranging from ‘A for acid attack’ to ‘Z for zionism’. Larger stitched works reach even further beyond the artist’s personal visual references and comment on international examples of social and political injustice, from the killing of George Floyd to the Grenfell Tower tragedy.
On closer inspection, the feisty children that greet visitors upon entry may not display examples of happy childhood scenes after all. Using quilting techniques traditionally passed from mother to daughter and frequently embedded with subversive messages, Westerhof combines patches from clothes she wore as a child with newspaper clippings; family snapshots with news agency stills. The girl with inflatable swimming aids and the boy with mushroom clouds on his shirt are possibly not captured in play but in search for safety, the others crossing their arms in defiance of discrimination and persecution.
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