Having graduated from ECA in 2020, the ‘daunting covid year’ as she put it, Molly has since continued her rug tufting and weaving in the most extraordinary of ways.
Now charged with themes of flashbacks and nightmares, Molly’s work combines her experiences of complex PTSD, with the realities of being an artist and living aside technology.
Such concepts originated from her university project, Doubt in the Digital Age. This featured abstract rugs which crawled up the walls, imitating how doubt seeps in when art students compare their works to one another. Quite clearly, self-criticism has become perpetuated in the age of Instagram. Artists today struggle with the balance of networking online, without spiralling into self-comparison with others.
Molly elaborated how this is a particular issue for students even in person at university, since they are constantly boxed into deadlines and grades. This conflicts with the time-consuming and subjective nature of art. So in response to this, Molly pinned her ‘doubting’ rugs upon the walls at ECA sculpture court. These viral-like creatures crawled up the walls, casting the metaphor that doubt was quite literally embedded on the campus grounds.
Since then, Molly has gone on to experiment with capture-texts and motifs from website interfaces. Most recently, she has been materialising her nightmares in yarn. Dreams, They Haunt Me and her ongoing Dream Weaving are two series which focus on this theme. These works incorporate the fire emoji, empty houses, dark silhouettes and eerie narratives. Molly explained how nightmares are often bizarre, irrational, and how she wished to translate this into a physical object.
These tapestries were some of her most striking for me, not just because of the ‘roaring’ fire motif; but due to their depth, their raw honesty. Trapped, Mayday and They Come Alive After Dark, all play into this concept of fear.
Spiralling expresses the feeling of people requesting too much of you, whether this be emotionally, perhaps in work or even with academic deadlines. Cloudy Days is more abstracted, with a silhouetted person falling out an overcast sky embroidered with lightning. This piece seemed to symbolise a feeling of detachment, of being out of control. Perhaps, this could be articulating depersonalisation, which is a symptom of anxiety.
Molly rounded up her chat, by giving some very insightful advice for any aspiring artists. The most important takeaway of her talk, alongside us all admiring her beautiful tapestries, was how important it is to stay authentic and to stick to creating what you want rather than what you think other people will buy.
Follow Molly at @mollyhkent or https://mollyhkent.com
Image credits: All photographs of the artworks are taken by the author with permission from the artist.