RAFT: Karen Kraven & Swapnaa Tamhane

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Thames Art Gallery, Chatham, ON

Dates: January 16- April 5, 2026

 

Exhibition description:

 

In 2022, Karen Kraven invited Swapnaa Tamhane to contribute an exhibition essay for her solo exhibition titled Le Chiffonnier. This exhibition centered on the metaphor of the “rag-picker”, who collected rags and scraps from piles of detritus for the paper industry, and was a legitimate profession in the mid-1800s. The metaphor also extends to the painting “The Rag-Picker” (1865-1971) by Édouard Manet, a moody portrait believed to be of the poet Charles Baudelaire depicted with a heavy sack, surrounded by oyster shells and a broken champagne bottle. The figure represents someone who lives on the margins of society as unrecorded labour. A dialogue emerged between Kraven and Tamhane from studio visits which led to the idea of developing a longer-term process of exchanging research, texts, images, and making a collaborative artwork, as intersections appeared between their practices. Both artists consider the role of the handmade in relation to mass production.

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For this exhibition, RAFT, Kraven and Tamhane have made a collaborative sculpture which they will treat as a frame for a series of paper works, textiles, paper pulp, and fabrics. The reference for this sculpture is sourced from a washing tank that Tamhane came across in Kutch, Gujarat, where she works with block printers and dyers. On a cold January day in early 2020, she documented men standing inside the tank, washing cloth, and rinsing excess dyes. The tank itself was constructed from concrete and has stepped heights to accommodate the first wash, then the second, then the third. These labourers were wearing raincoats, masks, and sunglasses. The sculpture has been reinterpreted by Kraven and Tamhane as a steel frame – like a drawing in space – that echoes the dimensions of the original washing tank and is around 20 ft in length.

Kraven will be showing a series of recent sculptures, wall-based works and photographs including coat-like sculptures made from off-cuts and waste from the slow-fashion industry that have been discharged, shredded and reconstructed to give the sense of roaming through infinite cycles of pawning, borrowing, and circulating in the rag cosmos. Off-cuts are the material not meant to be part of the clothing, itinerant leftovers that shift between form and function, alongside the body.

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Kraven’s Warp & Weft is a diptych that captures a found, tattered, plastic tarp and a replica, made by unravelling a new, store-bought tarp. Both objects were photographed individually, in the studio, attempting to make them look identical and caught in the wind. The act of comparing the handmade to the machine-made speaks to the invisibility and devalueing of textile labour.

Sculptures Hoist & Le Chiffonnier make references to the textile factory; machinery, technology and apparati used by skilled labourers.

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Tamhane will show new drawings that include the labourers washing or standing in the tank. Also included are a series of recycled plastic weavings, which are made from biscuit wrappers or garbage bags that waste collectors take from piles of garbage that otherwise might be burned, or collect in large piles. The plastic waste is sanitized and separated by colour, and cut into long strips to make yarns, and are then woven by artisans on a loom. Tamhane’s works include words like “A Nod To”, or “Caption”, which are part of an ongoing body of work that examines how language is lazily recycled when describing the work of BIPOC artists. Also included is a long rope made from scrap yardage from kala (black) cotton, an organic rain-fed crop that is indigenous to Kutch which has been reintroduced to the region.