Tóth Anna Eszter’s solo exhibition Cut Outs presents textile works created over the past few years, exploring plant-based dyeing and the act of cutting as central gestures. As a doctoral researcher at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, the artist explores ecoprinting, steam bundle dyeing, and making plant-based dye baths. The exhibition is a reflection of this ongoing experimental research.
The textile works are not fixed, definitive images, but adaptable spatial structures. The unpredictability of plant pigments requires the artist to relinquish some control to the material itself. In this way, the show explores the relationships between intention and chance, control and letting
go, form and formlessness.
The title Cut Outs refers to the artist’s childhood memories of cutting patterns into folded paper and unfolding it to reveal the pattern within. Tóth translates this gesture into her textile works, where the amorphous stains and organic imprints of plant-based dyeing are juxtaposed with repeated geometric cut-outs. While pigments seep into the fibres and merge with the material to shape the surface, cutting creates voids from which new patterns and visual arrangements emerge.
The ceramics exhibited alongside the textile works can be read as petrified versions of folded textiles.
Both the soft, mutable textile and the hard, static ceramic preserve imprints: the former bears traces of plants, while the latter captures the textures of fabrics, towels, and lace pressed into clay. The works unfold tensions between softness and solidity, presence and absence, raw intervention and
sensuality.
The works reflect the fragile and vulnerable nature of time, while also confronting us with the illusion of permanence and stability. Their transformation does not end with the artist’s intervention: exposed to the effects of time and their surroundings, the materials continue to change, independently of the artist’s original intentions.