‘Under the Silk Cotton tree - and other words’

‘Under the Silk Cotton tree - and other words’ is an imaginative space framed by a story and fragments of stories, centered around the artist’s inherited knowledge and experience around fibre from her mixed cultural background. 

The piece explores the relationship between fibre and storytelling on several levels, physical and imaginative, and invites the viewer to see the connected stories within their own memories. 

The use of rope, sisal, cordage, in Abakanowicz’s earlier works have inspired the physical format of this book. 


Artist Bio

Liselli is an artist and scenographer that uses storytelling as a framework to find the meeting place(s) between narrative and space building, to further explore the connections between craft, heritage and communication. 

The intertwined connections between fibre and how it has woven itself into our forms of communication is one aspect of Liselli’s practice as an artist. 

Drawing inspiration from Abakanowicz’s representation of rope, its strength, as she calls it, ‘carried by all twined elements, such as a tree, human hand, birds, wings- all built of countless, cooperative parts’, reflects the notion of connectivity central to the artist’s practice.