VOLUMES, SHADOWS, AND HALOS OF MEANING IN BARBARA PRENKA’S SCULPTURAL BLANKETS

| by Alessandra Tempesti |

For several years, Barbara Prenka’s research has focused on an object that accompanies our lives, stays in contact with the body, envelops it, and protects it: the blanket, understood as a metaphor for care, essential in contexts of social marginalization, migration, conflict, and vulnerability. These are experiences Prenka herself lived through when, in 1998, she was forced to leave Kosovo, her country of origin, during the war.

Her quilts, however, belong to a different dimension: they have no practical function, they do not interact with bodies, and they do not provide warmth. Hybrid objects suspended between painting and sculpture, they exist in an intermediate space between image and plastic relief. They are the outcome of a painterly investigation that finds in fabric printing a new expressive medium through which to reinterpret and reconfigure patterns of skies and horizons, rendered unnatural by their vivid, striking colors. The digitally printed fabric, finished with a metallic sheen, is then padded and stitched by the artist, who follows the lines of the design with a sewing machine, giving depth and dimension to an abstract landscape that first exists in the mind before taking shape in textile matter.

Barbara Prenka’s blankets emerge from a radical act of reconstructing the object anew, shaped by the memory of an original rupture – exile – and by a connection to feminine traditions passed down through the women of her family, gathering together to sew and embroider. The artist reformulates this craft practice into a new language, transforming the blanket into a potentially infinite landscape, just as infinite are the combinations of skies reflected through the subjectivity of perception.

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