Meta4 at Artereal Gallery

And Artereal Gallery has a blog, with a Q&A with me about the work in this show.

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.

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

Sock rope

In this post I'm showing a work which I proposed as an exhibition in Sculpture by the Sea. It was rejected by SbtS, so I thought I'd use this to reiterate the philosophy of this blog. I'm not trying to show my best work here, or the most successful, or my favourite; I'm showing ALL my work. I've destroyed some past work not because I'm embarrassed by it, or because it might weaken my brand, but because I haven't had enough space to store everything. I'm the artist I am today because of the evolution of my work, because of the work I've made as well as the work I haven't made, the artistic dead-ends, and the works that have sold and gone to appreciative homes. I'm also quite happy for someone to look at some work and say, "Meh, I don't like it," or even, "That's terrible!" I'm not editing the work, just presenting. I'm trying for an autobiographical display, rather than an aesthetic one.

So, given that caveat, what's this work all about? Part of the reason this was rejected is because it's not that well thought out. I'd been collecting socks from people for part of my MFA (click on the Socks link at the end of the post for various sock works), and still had hundreds on hand after making the work. This was an attempt to find some way of using them up. I've plaited them into a giant braid (or have I braided them into a giant plait?). The idea was that this braid would encircle Marks Park at Bondi, one of the locations for Sculpture by the Sea. I guess part of the idea was that these were socks which people had been walking in which were now to be used to delineate a walking space. Or something. I really didn't think it through too well. And the presentation wasn't that great. How was it to be held down? What would happen when it rained? Would people trip over it? I'm still hoping that I can resurrect the idea of the sock rope at some point in the future, not for this location, but in some other form, maybe a lot of shorter ropes hanging from a ceiling? The rope is chunky and colourful, but I'm not really sure what it would mean, which is why I'm blocked with the idea!

I think I stole the idea from Janine Antoni. At the end of the images of my work are two photos of Antoni's work Moor. Here's an excerpt from my book about her work:

Janine Antoni has also used items donated by individuals, but her work is concerned with the individual and the group. Antoni’s Moor, 2001, is a rope made from objects that family and friends had donated to her, all of which were listed during the exhibition. The items include
clothing, hair, Christmas lights, extension cords, towels, etc. Antoni and her assistants cut the items into strips, twisted them, then let strands of these materials twist back onto each other to create a thick rope. The work is a metaphor for connectedness. Antoni says, “A rope is an umbilical cord – it’s something that connects two things. Which, sort of, is what Moor is about. It’s about all these people, you know, my life sort of connecting all these people. The idea was to take all these very different materials, but also lives, and sort of bring them together through the rope-making process.”

In the book that was produced in conjunction with the installation, Antoni lists all the items that are in the rope, to whom they belonged, and a narrative around the object if the donor provided one:

Melissa’s dental floss is used as whipping to secure the beginning of the
rope and it is clasping Danielle’s red reversible jacket, which is black on
the other side and which her roommate Katrin from Germany gave to
her, and she never really wore the jacket and feels like it drifted into her
life the same way that Katrin did and Danielle’s jacket is entwined with a
green t-shirt of Pat’s that “could be up to fifteen years old and I have
worn it all that time so that it was almost completely worn away, and I
could not bear to part with it because it had made it so far” and Pat’s tshirt
is entwined with Glenn’s brown sweater from Old Navy that got
stretched out and “nothing from that store ever lasts” and Glenn’s
sweater is entwined with his friend Byron’s striped velour ‘Hang Ten’ shirt
and Byron is in many ways stuck in the seventies and he wants to be a
surfer and Byron’s shirt is entwined with his wife Lisa’s studio jeans worn
while making her paintings…

Moor not only “extract[s] the poetry that lies latent in all material,” but also shows the connectedness of humanity that has been my concern in I Am Because We Are. All people, regardless of how poor they may be, have some objects, even if only their clothing, that can be used to represent them.

















Janine Antoni's work Moor:



I also recently found this last image. It's an installation by Janice Appleton called there is something I need to tell you. I don't know anything about it other than this image, but it looks like a rope made of clothes connects these two outfits.

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):