Edition

Sukaina Kubba

Afterfeather

These limited-edition laser etchings have been produced by artist Sukaina Kubba and DCA Print Studio to coincide with Turn Me Into a Flower; the first major show in a UK institution from the Toronto-based artist. The exhibition debuts a new body of work created during a production residency with DCA Print Studio.

Kubba is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is strongly rooted in material and cultural research, storytelling, and drawing connections. The artist works with industrial and packaging materials, and explores traveling objects, textiles and vehicles as carriers of cross-cultural histories. Her practice spans the mediums of drawing, painting, printmaking, fibres, audio, video and installation, and interrogates narratives of cultural and material assimilation and appropriation.

The artist’s recent research into Persian rugs through family and domestic encounters, fictional stories and collections seeks to transmit narratives of their travel, trade and acquisition into collections. Her work invokes the history of these rugs: their origins, extraction, manufacture, packaging and trade, and deployment of their textures and visual properties.

As with the other commissioned works in Turn Me Into a Flower, this pair of black laser etchings are based on a tracing Kubba drew of a document at the Stoddard-Templeton Design archive at the University of Glasgow. Their archive drawers house Victorian era tracings of Persian and other ‘Oriental’ rugs made by the designers at the Stoddard-Templeton factory. The archives mark a historic moment in the colonial appropriation of traditional crafts from British colonies into mechanised manufacture in Scotland.

The drawings depict Iranian flora and fauna (such as poplar trees, Caspian tigers and nightingales) and common rug motifs such as the medallion. By etching almost to the full depth of the dark black Somerset paper, the images visually alternate between a velvety and a lace-like texture, harking back to the textiles imitated by the Stoddard-Templeton designers.

This pair of prints mark the culmination of the first print production residency collaboration between DCA Print Studio and DCA Exhibitions.

These prints are available individually or as a pair.

$275.00 CAD

Edition: 30

Media: Laser Etching on Somerset Velvet 300gsm black paper

Dimensions: Image Size: 28.5 x 17.8cm, Paper Size: 37.5 x 27.5cm

Signature: Signed and numbered by artist verso

Created in DCA Print Studio. Co-published between DCA and Mercer Union, Toronto, through the support of Creative Scotland & British Council.

Editioned by Claire McVinnie.

Mercer Union would like to acknowledge the generous support of Superframe, for extending a special framing price to buyers of Afterfeather: Poplar Tree and Afterfeather: Caspian Tiger: $370 ea. plus HST (regular $432 ea. plus HST). Offer valid on framing orders placed by 31 December 2024.