Laura Eldret rugs launch fig-2, ICA London

This week sees the launch of fig-2 at London’s ICA in association with Outset. The series of fifty projects over fifty weeks is presented in the ICA Studio, which is open 7 days a week (and late, 6-8pm, on Mondays). It mimics the ground breaking fig-1 series conceived and developed...

This week sees the launch of fig-2 at London’s ICA in association with Outset. The series of fifty projects over fifty weeks is presented in the ICA Studio, which is open 7 days a week (and late, 6-8pm, on Mondays).

It mimics the ground breaking fig-1 series conceived and developed by Mark Francis and Jay Jopling in a Soho warehouse fifteen years ago. This aimed to capture the zeitgeist of the time by offering diverse artists such as Grayson Perry, Howard Hodgkin, Tracey Emin, Wolfgang Tillmans, Will Self and Patti Smith a platform for spontaneous artistic exploration without the usual bureaucracy or commercial pressures.

Fatoş Üstek, Art Fund Curator at fig-2, explains that: ‘fig-2‘s format utilises change as a constant. fig-2‘s structure of fifty successive exhibitions realised on a weekly basis… will cultivate uncertainty and conscious incompleteness through each and every project that is driven by the radical imagination of artists, writers, dancers, architects, and designers’.

London based Laura Eldret will bookend the project, utilising the space in slots 1/50 and 50/50. The launch show features seven flatwoven rugs inspired by her time spent with Zapotec communities in Mexico. In a BBC interview, she expresses her enthusiasm for ’sharing the very beginnings of a project, and then in a year returning to the same space’. Basketballs, bags of juice and exotic beach scenes are muddled into traditional carpet compositions and motifs.

More textiles are on show elsewhere at the ICA, both in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2014 to 25 January and in an immersive installation by Julie Verhoeven in the Fox Reading Room to 18 January 2015.