Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award Exhibition

I've got more information about the Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award exhibition. All the photos here have been generously provided by Louise Saxton whose Home-tree is the work on the left above. Firstly, here's a list of all the finalists in the show:

Soraya Abidin, Sally Blake, Jayne Branchflower, Annabelle Collett, Cresside Collette, Sue Ferrari, Dianne Firth, Melanie Fitzmaurice, Pamela Fitzsimons, Saffron Lily Gordon, Hilary Green, Tim Gresham, Mandy Gunn, Cecilia Heffer, Abigail Howells, Peta Jones, Adrienne Kneebone, Anita Larkin, Kay Lawrence, Sara Lindsay, Rodney Love, Barbara Macey, Penny Malone, Susan Mathews, Julie Montgarrett, Sabine Parge, Jennifer Robertson, Julie Ryder, Louise Saxton, Demelza Sherwood, Patrick Snelling, Emma Sulzer, Libby Van Schaick, Sera Waters, Ilka White, and Louiseann Zahra-King

As I wrote here, Mandy Gunn was the winner of this inaugural award. Here's her work Fire Sticks from the Burn Out series.


This is the entrance to the show, with Sea life wall pod installation by Penny Malone, and Sara Lindsay's Parampara #2.


This shot has my work Six Degrees: Vida Gaigalas to Bob Hunt on the right, Melanie Fitzmaurice's Explorer's Rope in the middle, and Pamela Fitzsimons' Skin/eucalyptus on the left. I think the work on the floor is Louiseann Zahra-King's A bird readies the soul and moves it to tenderness.


Emma Sulzer's Puma cat (with two other works) is in the foreground, the hanging work is Sue Ferrari's Common Threads, and the wall on the left has Cresside Collette's Two Lands Suite, I think.



From left to right: Julie Ryder's Variations I (Leaves), Cecilia Heffer's Reticella Lace, I think Hilary Green's Tracking South, Annabelle Collett's Swatches - Merge & Filter, and Soraya Abidin's Love Fruit on the plinth.





I think this is Kay Lawrence's This is rain.


This is Anita Larkin's Speak to me of things unknown, and maybe Tim Gresham's Liquid Module IV.



Pretty by Demelza Sherwood:


The work on the left may be Julie Montgarrett's Expository Angel, and RED Stones #1 by Dianne Firth is on the right.


Here are some pages from the catalogue:





Here's an article I found online and linked to from my previous post, but it then disappeared. Fortunately I'd printed it out, and here it is. It's from the Wangaratta Chronicle.

Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award Winner

This is just a brief post to record the winner of the Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award. Apparently, informed sources tell me, Mandy Gunn is the deserved winner for her piece Fire Sticks. Mandy is also a fellow Tamworth Textile Biennial artist. These are the only details I've got so far, but I'll post more info as soon as I get it! Below are some images provided by Louise Saxton, whose work also appears on the cover of the invitation shown in the link above. Congratulations to Mandy, and all the other artists in what is by a number of accounts a great show. I've also found an article announcing the winner here, and which, as an added bonus, mentions my work. (It seems to have moved and I can't find it, but I have an image of it in my next post.)

Object magazine, Momentum review

Object magazine has published a review of Momentum, the 18th Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial 2008, written by the brilliant Belinda von Mengersen. (See here for other Momentum blog posts) Object 58, May 2009

Drawing pin shoe sculptures

This post shows a pair of shoe sculptures that I made in the late 90s, and which I first showed in the Touch show at PCL Exhibitionists in 1999. It was a pair of shoes painted gold and covered with drawing pins, then covered in polyester resin. The first shoe is pristine, with the pins shining gold, neat and clean. The title is Whoever Fits This Shoe Will Be My Bride, an obvious reference to Cinderella, but with the suggestion of darkness behind the perfect marriage.


The other shoe is battered and rusted, some pins have fallen off. The title is Happily Ever After, adding to the idea that marriage is not all it's made out to be.

Memento Vivere

This post features hand-made paper works I made when I was Artist-In-Residence at the UNSW Union from February to May 2002. My proposal was to make these paper works as well as giving a papermaking workshop during the residency. All the paper was made with hair in it. The main project, Memento Vivere (the opposite of memento mori - I may have coined this term myself... Also the name of the exhibition which ran from April 26 to May 3), had hair from one individual in each sheet. It is difficult to photograph as all the sheets are white or cream with bits of hair the only imagery. Each 16x16cm sheet is a portrait of the person who has donated that hair. The first two images are close-up shots of the installation, and the third is all 90 of the sheets in this installation (later in the year I exhibited it with 162? sheets). This was the first project where the emphasis was placed on the individuals who hair is displayed. Before this, the hair acted as a metaphor for groups of anonymous people (see these sculptures, for example), and would later become groups of joined individuals in my hair weavings (here, for example). The list of all the people who donated hair is in the catalogue at the end of this post. They number 109 in the catalogue, there are 110 bags of hair below, but only 90 sheets of paper. I assume this was a matter of timing - I didn't receive the hair donations in time to make paper for this show, but they were included in my Honours graduation show at the end of the year.




This was the hair I used to make the above series. I originally asked for passport-sized photographs as well as hair, but received so few that I didn't end up using them, except for the series with my own images below.



The following series, Rodney über Alles, has only my hair in the sheets of paper, and with photobooth photos of me printed on them. At the opening, someone asked me if the people were all in the same family...



The following series is one that I've written about before but thought I'd revisit the whole series, given that I started all these projects at the same time. I realized that the image below was not from the MARS Gallery show as I wrote, but from the exhibition of new works that I made for my residency at the Union. The series is called Long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty, oily, greasy, fleecy, shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen, knotted, polka-dotted, twisted, beaded, braided, powdered, flowered and confettied, bangled, tangled, spangled and spaghettied. It's a collection of hair-related texts and images, from science, fairy tales, religion, fashion, history, etc. Go to the link at the beginning of this paragraph to see details of individual works.




This series, Una Nox Dormienda, used left-over paper from the above 3 series. I buried sheets in the garden, so they're stained from soil. Rather unexpectedly - because I hadn't even thought about it - worms ate chunks from the paper which added to the appearance of age, and suggests the passage of time. I've added text from The Book of Revelations to add a religious dimension. The title comes from Catallus' "nox est perpetua una dormienda" (night stretches forth in one long sleep) - when we die we sleep, with no idea of an afterlife. I've compared this with the Christian idea of a life after death, but the state of the paper parallels what will really happen to us - eaten by worms, and decaying in the earth.



At the end of the residency was an exhibition of the work I had created during that time (plus an exhibition half way through the residency which featured earlier works - a mini-retrospective!). This was the invitation to the final show:


And this was the catalogue:




A COFA Art History and Theory student, Jennifer Hamilton, wrote a review of the exhibition for Artwrite, an online journal produced by COFA students. I can no longer find it online, but this is a copy of the printed article:

Aluminium foil sculptures

This post just has two random sculptures made from aluminium foil twisted into rope, I guess you could say, and then manipulated into larger forms. the first work is called Silver Circus, if I recall. There's a small wire box inside the mass of foil which the foil ropes snake in and out of. I think the whole thing was covered with resin and spray painted silver. It was already silver, but I think I wanted it even more silver!


This work has no title and was never exhibited. It was just an experiment with the foil "yarn." I guess it's a kind of basket, if you stretch that definition a bit.

Plastic cling wrap textiles

This post shows some textile works that I made from plastic cling wrap. The first three small works are offcuts from a large box-shaped work which was twisted cling wrap woven over a wooden frame. I cut that work up and stretched sections over wooden panels to make these works.


These works were woven on a loom, just a plain weave with the twisted cling wrap. This is about 15cm wide, and the second work is about 30cm (with a close-up shot after that).




I don't think I've ever exhibited any of these works, nor do they have titles. I showed another plastic wrap work here.