Notations - On Textile

The exhibition presents the work of seven artists exploring forms of notation in a range of materials and practices. Collectively they draw on an engagement with textiles across generations and cultures as social, conceptual and material threads.

Pia Larsen’s installation explores the language of colour and form utilising paper and textile elements as material notations in space. The textile is from 1970’s clothing painted with dye by her grandmother, interdisciplinary abstract artist Margo Lewers.

Jacqueline Rose’s works are a playful hybrid of writing and drawing; text and textile. Intensive repetitions and rhythms of linear configurations allude to weaving, stitching, patterning, textures, warp and weft. Whilst the calligraphic marks / glyphs have the essence of writing in its gestures and movements, the glyphs are illegible.

Hannah McKellar In response to Broadhurst’s iconic design, The Cranes—widely reproduced across wallpapers and textiles—McKellar stages a theatrical installation of draped gold fabric that partially veils a hand-embroidered “scrap” of wallpaper concealed behind it. Presented alongside this work is McKellar’s earlier series, Shields.

Lisa Pang With this work, I place myself into the tensioned creation of a textile. In doing this, I am situating myself within a series of soft frameworks, literal as well as layered. I am a painter working with elemental line, colour and form while tied to gallery support. I am also a weaver as simple movements make the cloth. The rhythms of this ancient and portable form of textile production stretch across time, place and communities.

Stuart Bailey’s ongoing series of textile works reflect on music subculture through craft traditions. Extreme music is seen as a wild and unhinged expression of resistance; yet embedded within a musical sub-genre with well-established social and creative boundaries. The embroidery works are a fans dedication to music, whilst also raising questions about a genre that revels in its strictures.

Belle Blau's work continues her interest in the relational by drawing on correspondence between her late grandparents in which they discuss the dyeing, spinning and weaving of wool—which came to be a functional, creative and symbolic act of maintaining the social fabric between them across great distance.

Margaret Robert’s
Popova’s Column
A century after Liubov Popova made her red and blue watercolour Textile Design in 1923 to be printed onto cotton fabric for workers’ clothing, I will remake it, enlarging it into a wall drawing 2.7m high with its diagonals outlined in red and blue yarn held in place by black tacks. I am borrowing the convention from music of arranging existing compositions for different instruments. Just as instruments are connected within one realm (music), clothing and walls are connected in another realm by facilitating our inhabitation of places, and it is our relationship to place that has long motivated my art practice. This kind of adaptation is a way to selectively collaborate with art practices of past generations, acknowledging precursors and exploring the enigma of time, something I have been working with for more than a decade