Six Degrees Exhibition Wangaratta

Last weekend I went to rural Victoria for a textile symposium organised by the Wangaratta Exhibitions Gallery to coincide with the opening of the Petite show of textile miniatures, and my own show in the Wangaratta Performing Arts Centre. My show was called Six Degrees. The invitation is above. Parts of two series were shown - four pieces from the woven-human-hair Six Degrees series, and fourteen sock panels from the I Am Because We Are installation. I gave a presentation at the symposium on the evolution of one strand of my art practice that led to the two series on display.

Textile Symposium/Six Degrees Exhibition

This weekend I'm flying down to the Victorian town of Wangaratta for a textile symposium, and the opening of an exhibition of work of mine at the Wangaratta Performing Arts Centre.

RODNEY LOVE

SIX DEGREES

Wangaratta Performing Arts Centre
Foyer Gallery
3 - 25 July 2010

Sydney artist Rodney Love presents two series of works that are based on double weave techniques and his conceptual ideas about groups and individuals - how they relate to one another, how one shapes the other, how they are connected.

Including the names of the people who donated the hair and socks to be woven, the works become a commemorative object, taking Rodney into his current research into memorials and monuments.

I'll be giving a presentation at the Symposium about my work, and how the links between my conceptual concerns, techniques and materials have made my work evolve the way it has.

2010 Textile Symposium
Symposium, Dinner, Exhibitions, Workshops

3 - 7 July 2010

Textile artists and enthusiasts are encouraged to participate in this exciting program of textile-related talks, exhibitions and workshops.

The main symposium from 10am-3.30pm on Saturday 3 July will include keynote speakers Lorraine Connelly-Northey, Sylvia Kleinert, Rodney Love, Louise Saxton and Cheryl Thornton.

Workshops run over the following four days include Indigenous Basket Weaving, Miniature Suzanis, Machine Embroidery and Freeform Crochet.

Exhibitions include Flourish, Petite, Ensemble (Wangaratta exhibitions Gallery Collection) and Six Degrees (Rodney Love).

To download the full program (PDF 640kb) please click here

I Am Because We Are Panels 2

This post continues the look at the sock panels that made up the I Am Because We Are installation. This work was made for the floor of the installation (above), but in the recent Landscapes: A Journey Home in Textiles show at Kudos Gallery it was exhibited running from the wall down onto the floor. The reason I embarked on this part of the project (naming the people whose socks make up each of the sections) is so that when I exhibit the work and people ask, "Are my socks in this one?" I can direct them here to check. The list of names below has some of the names repeated. This was because I used a number of different socks of theirs to make sure that I had variety in the colours of the panels. The names are typed onto ribbon which is woven in with the socks (the white strips you can see in the photos).




Andrew Metcalfe, Sandra Burchill, Ian Howard, Margaret Jackson, Anda Black, Bill Mobbs, Illona Caldow, Noel Love, Richard Brown, Ingrid Davis, Kennie Ward, Kevin Russell, Nancy Hall, Linda Jaivin, Paul Cordeiro, Peter Black, Harry Lukies, Quinn Cretney-Ross, Vivienne Webb, Sue Olive, Pat House, Andrew Gwinnett, Laila Marie Costa, Phillip Black, James Staniforth-Smith, Tony Napoli, Sally Hill, Libby Knott, Greg Cook, Peter Perry, Tim Lever, Myles Wearring, Barbara Mobbs, Charlie Blum, Russell Storer, Tim Smith, Billie Dyer, Roy Milton, Ada Markby, Joy Wellings, Kay Lyon, Peter Wong, Renata Joy Field, Miki Wakatsuki, Vanila Netto, Peter Black, Scott Maclennan, Siobhan Punshon, Donna Page, Jan Blum, Rebecca Reynolds, Allan Giddy, Jenya Osborne, Paraskevi Zafiriou, Alice Engel, Isolde Lennon, Tim Lever, Liddy Roulston, Ingrid Davis, Marianne Little, Rahayu Agustina, Ella Freer, Colleen Drew, Jenna Bateman, Sandra Eterovic, Virginia Baldwin, Margaret King, Jenya Osborne, Liddy Roulston, Peggy Smith, Kevin Greene, Dominick Rosenthal, Kristin Headlam, Viola Hofer, Gail Stiffe, Kathryn Greiner, Penelope Benton, Micheal Smith, Richard Morris, Mollie Osborne, Emmett O'Shea, Penelope Seidler, Clare Hodgins, Barbara Rogers, Basil Bessiris, Pierre Thibaudeau, Millie Phelan, Lyn Dickson, Gavin Palmer, Kean Wong, Fiona Kennedy, Rex Deutscher, Tamsin Hughes, Mike Stiffe, Phillip Black, Ian Fletcher, Suzanna Tan, Neryl Lewis, Ky Fisher, Linda Jaivin, Sally Sorell, Rex Deutscher, Margaret King, Barbara Rogers, François Limondin, Tineke Hazel, Kevin Greene, Colleen Drew, Val Little, Sandra Burchill, Ada Markby, Emmett O'Shea, Richard Morris

Landscapes: A Journey Home in Textiles

This post is about a show that opens next week at Kudos Gallery in Paddington. It's a textiles show featuring the work of a number of COFA students and staff. Details are on the invitation below:


This is my explanation of my work and how it fits the theme of the show:

Embodied Landscapes

The works for this exhibition were all made from old socks. I imagine these socks as people wore them to go about their lives, walking across pavements and parks and suburban streets. They have taken on the energy from the lives they have been connected to; the lived experience has become embodied in these socks. Along the way they have encountered myriad landscapes, the stages upon which our lives are lived. And each time they returned home, they brought those landscapes with them.

With these works I’m not trying to represent a landscape, but merely show the physical products that have moved through various landscapes. With the work from the I Am Because We Are series, not only are the various people joined together by their shared humanity, but also by our shared environment; Not only are our lives shaped by our social experiences, but also by the world that sustains us. As we irrevocably change our landscape, so we change ourselves.

The first two works are both called Embodied Landscapes, and are new this year. Embodied Landscapes 1 is made from only white socks, but the range of shades gives it a feeling of geological strata, meshing with the landscape theme. I've included shots of it stretched out and rolled up. I like both effects.





This is Embodied Landscapes 2. I showed a slightly different configuration of it in this post, before I sewed the individual lengths together. I was inspired by African kente cloth, but it also reminds me of Sean Scully's paintings.


This floor piece was part of the I Am Because We Are installation, but I intended the greens and browns of the colour scheme to evoke a landscape when I made it, so thought it would fit this show, too.

I Am Because We Are Panels 1

I've been meaning to post these sock panels individually for awhile now. I wanted to acknowledge the people who donated socks for the I Am Because We Are installation, so I thought I'd show a couple of panels at a time with the list of the donors. These two are the first ones that I wove for this project, so the number of donors was still quite small, hence the same people's socks being in both panels. The fabric has been stretched around wooden frames. My original idea was to have them loose, but stretching them over a frame gave them a solid edge which worked better with the memorial theme that I was researching. The names of the donors have been typed onto ribbons which have been woven in with the sock strips.






This is an installation shot from my MFA grad show which includes the two panels:

Grey panel

Emmett O’Shea, Mark Jones, Natham Turner, Gavin Palmer, Phillip Black, Rex Deutscher, Marianne Little, Sue Olive, Pierre Thibaudeau, Tim Lever, Lyndal Campbell, Miki Wakatsuki, Charlie Blum, Peter Perry, Andrew Metcalfe, Alan Ashton, Sandra Eterovic, Micheal Smith, Margaret King, Sue Best, Bill Mobbs, Kay Lyon, Matthew Hall, Olivier Thibaudeau, Sandra Burchill, Robert Dreyer, Thomas wanner, Peter Black, Illona Caldow


Red, white and blue panel

Barbara Rogers, Judy Bourke, Lee Rhiannon, Lyn Dickson, Jacob Kristensen, Tim Dyce, Nazuna Tomita, Liddy Roulston, Gavin Palmer, Claire Milledge, Mark Smith, Diane Losche, Matthew Cecchin, Greg Ward, Sally Sorell, Vanjy Araujo, Tim Lever, Natham Turner, William Lo Giudice, Sharron Olivier, Hanae Satou, François Limondin, Marina Ely, Sandra Eterovic, Marcel Freer, Rex Deutscher, Kristin Headlam

Applications

I've been a bit busy the past couple of weeks with various applications and proposals. Most of these applications have had variations of the same works, or at least the same types of work, mostly hair weavings. I'm still working on some textiles made with old socks, but mainly out of an interest in using all the material that I have rather than an overwhelming desire to keep using socks. I am eager to make new hair textiles, but am trying to also finish some paintings I've started, then use up a number of canvases and panels on some new painting projects, THEN get back to some hair weavings. I guess the most high-profile application was for an Australia Council New Works Grant of $10,000. I got the application in at 11:46pm on Friday, with a midnight deadline. The grants are very competitive, and heaven knows I deserve one, but there would have been hundreds of applications, so chances are probably slim for getting one. My proposal for this grant was to buy my own loom, and then work on a new series of much larger hair weavings with more complex patterns and weave structures. I gave examples of past work including the large sock installation I Am Because We Are, plus a variety of past hair weavings, some of which I've shown here before:






The sock installation shows that I'm able to work on a large scale, and the hair weavings show a variety of textile structures, size and patterning.

The Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award entries also closed last week. I showed four works for consideration: the kimono from the installation above, a new sock weaving work based on African kente cloth traditions, The Devil's Cloth series, and a panel from the Six Degrees series:







Kente cloth is made by weaving narrow strips of often (usually? always?) striped cloth, and then sewing the strips together to make a larger textile. Mine is still a work in progress as the strips have not yet been sewn together.

I've also put in an application for a show with Margarita Sampson at Craft Victoria in Melbourne. This is for a show in 2010. I've proposed an exhibition of The Devil's Cloth series, and the Violence, Abjection and Ecstasy series (all of which can be seen in this post):

Textiles

This is a selection of textile works that I had images of on my computer, and which were webready. After I've finished posting these images, I'll start with some more in-depth looks at various series of work.

The first 3 works here are more of the artistic dead ends that I've written about in the past. The first is a plain weave mainly of linen, but with a supplementary weft of human hair.


This is one of about 3 or 4 works that I've made with GladWrap (actually a generic cling film). I twisted the film into a rope-like yarn, then wove a plain-weave textile. I like the white shininess that results, but I couldn't find enough conceptual concerns to make it artistic enough!


This work is probably one of the most "traditional" textile pieces that I've made. I made it when I first studied double weave techniques (so the reverse side is a black grid on a white field), and it's made from wool. I've almost never used just wool, or any other standard yarns (silk, cotton, even acrylic, etc). It feels too crafty for me and not arty enough. Not that there's anything wrong with making craft, it's just not what I want to do with my practice.


This is one of a series of 8 works collectively called Some People. When I started using socks for weaving at the beginning of my Master's degree, I was making a large and time-consuming installation, and needed to work on something a little different to keep me fresh! The series was included in the Dislocation show at Kudos Gallery in 2005. All the works in this series (I'll present the rest at some point in the future) are made from black and white socks. This was partly in response to the number of socks of those colours that I had collected, and knew I wouldn't be able to incorporate into the I Am Because We Are installation, but also because of the stark contrast betwen the 2 colours that would make bold patterns. This work is a plain weave, but half of the works in this series were also double-weave textiles. The title is from the title of a song from the musical Gypsy. I had been incorporating the names of the donors into the sock weavings, but not with this series, so the meaning is that these are just "some people" rather than named individuals (as well as including the meaning from the song, that some people are made for a boring, conventional life, but not everyone, and not me!). (See also this post for more info)

The following works, also made from socks, are from the aforementioned I Am Because We Are series. They were the first works that I made in that series, and were photographed by Julia Charles for an article by Amanda King, ‘For the Love of… Socks?’ in COFA Magazine, Issue 12, Summer 2004. Unfortunately the article was accompanied by a photo of me that was the least flattering photo of me ever to make it to print!



These white panels eventually were sewn together to become the kimono part of the installation (also seen in this post).