Elegy in Florals: Stitched in Time (2023) is a new collection of mixed media paintings from Mekia Machine that encapsulates her current relationship with studio practice.
Consciously carving out room for play and experimentation, embracing the materials she has at hand, and allowing them to guide her, Mekia has found herself revisiting her love for making alongside her painting practice.
Through the acts of gathering, sewing, sketching, and crafting she is reminded of her late Jamaican grandmother whose skilled hands once guided her own needle and thread. Mekia weaves these textured memories into her paintings, sewing flowers cut from her grandmother’s sheets onto the canvas, attaching ribbons, plastic, and letting threads hang loose. The figurative paintings that have emerged from these material experiments have an almost patchwork like quality to them; a stitching together of time, memory, and experience that capture a certain fragile beauty. A clock ticks, bodies unravel, and flowers spring forth from the seams.
These paintings are accompanied by a small selection of other studio sketches and experiments, and a reflection from Mekia on her grandmother and the eternal renewal of nature in our collection catalogue:
