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Prior to becoming an artist, Maya Berkhof (1989) worked as a tailor in the textile industry. The influence of that is obvious in the sculptures she has been making over the past year. Berkhof uses leftover stocks of poly tarp to plait and weave with, as if it were a supple textile. She thus magnifies fiddly activities like creating or mending fabric and turns these into spatial structures. Attached to or draped around something, her sculptures often seem to be behaving like items of clothing. Think of a woven sculpture wrapping itself around the corner of a building like a shawl or a giant object threaded around a fence.
For her new wall sculptures at Prospects, Berkhof found inspiration in darning samplers: pieces of cloth used to practice mending holes in textiles. Such repairs are often made with yarn in contrasting colours to highlight possible mistakes. She became interested in this phenomenon after reading an article about Amsterdam orphanages where, from the 17th to the 20th century, teenage girls perfected their darning and mending skills. She felt attracted to the visual power of these colourful repairs, as well as their crucial importance to safeguarding the orphans’ future.
With its references to the darning sampler, the sculptures at Prospects can also be interpreted as an elaboration on the concept of mending. Just like many of her earlier sculptures, these artworks embodies contradictions like old and new, broken and mended, thrown away and kept, autonomous and dependent.
Text: Sarah van Binsbergen
Translated from Dutch by Marie Louise Schoondergang (The Art of Translation)