Celia Pym

Celia Pym

Celia Pym is an artist living and working in London. She has been exploring damage and repair in textiles since 2007. Working with garments that belong to individuals as well as items in museum archives, she has extensive experience with the spectrum and stories of damage, from small moth holes to larger accidents with fire. Her interests concern the evidence of damage, and how repair draws attention to the places where garments and cloth wear down and grow thin. In clothing, this is often to do with use and how the body moves. She explores the difficulties of mending other people’s clothes, the materials used for mending, and making damage visible. Pym’s tools are scissors, yarn and a sharp needle. “Darning is small acts of care,” she says, “and paying attention.”
 
Her work has been exhibited most recently in Siblings, Trading Museum, Paris (2020), Sewing Box for the Future, V&A Dundee (2020), Material Matters, Textilmuseum, St Gallen (2020) and Don’t Feed the Monster! Galleri F15, Moss, Norway (2019).Pym was shortlisted for the Women’s Hour Craft Prize, V&A Museum, London and touring (2017-2019) and the inaugural Loewe Craft Prize, COAM, Madrid, Chamber Gallery, NY and 21_21 Gallery, Tokyo (2017). Her work is held in the collections of the Crafts Council UK and Noveau Musée National de Monaco.

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She is a Visiting Lecturer in Textiles at the Royal College of Art.

 

www.celiapym.com

Instagram: @celiapym