Dulguun Baatarsukh works at a unique intersection of textile design and contemporary art. She has a reputation in Mongolia as both a designer, celebrated for elegant one-off garments that convey deep emotion, and as a contemporary artist, with a long history of experimental practice as part of the Nomad Wave performance collective and the Blue Sun Contemporary Art Group.

Dulguun’s recent practice has extended to textile installations, where she experiments with natural fibres to create non-utilitarian counterparts to her trademark dresses, and refined painterly portraits of female figures that draw on a deep understanding of textures and patterns. Dulguun’s portraits are enigmatic compositions that locate stylised figures on simple grounds, incorporating patterns and fabrics into the composition of the face, as if to suggest a continuity between the clothing we wear and the countenance we affect in public. Her accompanying textile pieces have an earthy, refined quality and a rhythmic, symmetrical use of patterning that is sympathetic with the artist’s paintings.

Presented together in the Triennial, the works are grounded in a sense of the interconnectedness of all things, where seemingly independent elements are related by unseen patterns, connected by the artist through making.