Intimate Imitations

Lucienne Rickard & Linda Sok
 

What does it mean to remake something that has already been constructed? For Linda Sok and Lucienne Rickard, repetition is less an act of reproduction than a means of keeping something alive. In Intimate Imitation, both artists turn meticulous, repetitive processes into acts of remembrance, tracing the ways knowledge, affection and memory pass between bodies, generations and materials.

Sok's practice begins with images that have already travelled through multiple hands. Her Cambodian motifs originate in interpretations of lost traditional textiles recorded by French colonial archivists, before being redrawn by members of her family and translated once more by Sok into silk thread. Temples, birds, horses, leaves and figures in prayer emerge and dissolve within continuous lines of dyed and woven thread. The works are, in Sok's words, a "copy of a copy of a copy": each translation introduces loss, but also the possibility of something new. What remains is not an original, but a trace of everything that has passed through it.

This process makes the act of making inseparable from the act of remembering. Silk, one of the toughest naturally formed fibres, becomes a fitting material for this process: resilient yet delicate, carrying knowledge forward not through a fixed image, but through its continual reinterpretation. The labour embedded within these works becomes a form of lineage in itself.

Rickard similarly transforms the familiar through acts of painstaking attention. Her drawings of knitted garments begin with an intimate history: jumpers made for her by her mother. In recreating their forms through charcoal, graphite and chalk, Rickard matches one act of labour with another. The drawing becomes a call and response across generations, where the time invested in making becomes a measure of care. There is an old association, in fishing communities of the British Isles and in expeditions such as Shackleton's Endurance, of wool as something intimately bound to survival; a garment knitted by hand carrying the presence of the person who made it. Rickard's work carries something of that same charge: the jumper not as decoration but as a marker of who made it, and of the intimacy between maker and wearer.

Across Intimate Imitation, clothing and textiles become a kind of second skin. Sok's silk carries histories of cultural inheritance and rupture, while Rickard's garments evoke the skin humans shed: remnants of bodies, lives, and relationships that persist after their original owners have gone. Her Figures in a landscape, Venus, and Ichnite similarly collapse the distinction between the human and the natural, rendering fabric, bodies and landscape as interwoven forms. Ichnite, the geological term for a trace fossil, an impression left in stone by a creature no longer present, is a fitting title for this body of work: not a portrait of the mother, but the shape she left behind, translated now into another material entirely.

Perhaps this is where imitation becomes intimate. Neither artist seeks to preserve an original unchanged. Instead, both understand that inheritance is necessarily active: it must be handled, translated, unpicked and remade. Neither reproduces what is lost; each makes something new from its trace. What survives, then, is not the original object, image or gesture, but the relationship to it: the impulse to return, repeat and give it another life.

Joey Hespe