Featured Artist: Agustina Woodgate
Artist Agustina Woodgate goes “beyond skin” with her colorfully woven tapestries created from re-purposed plush dolls. Each piece in her Rug Collection series is a hand-sewn and designed rug made from recycled stuffed animal “skins”.
The process starts with the memory of the love imbued into each stuffed animal when they are in the hands of their owners. The rugs not only reference the personal histories of the toy’s owners, but investigate the rug as an object that organizes and displays memories and lineages. Woodgate is particularly drawn to the specific meanings in the arrangement of rug designs, and how the different histories belonging to each rug represent stories of the past and ways of tracing archetypes in physical and material forms. Woodgate sees the rug as an object of having the power to centralize the living space into pattern, operating beyond utility to depict the spiritual and mental world in woven form.
Woodgate’s work will be featured in her upcoming show Rugs at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Hollywood, FL, 2014