IN THE WORLD Head Hand Hear
CURATOR Vivonne Thwaites
Education Kit for In the world: head, hand, heart is availabe for download see bottom left, download Entry form here.
Entries for the 18th Tamworth Fibre Texile Biennial have now closed.

Exhibitors: Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, Aadje Bruce, Susanna Castleden, Chris De Rosa, Sandy Elverd, Ernabella Artists, Helen Fuller, Julie Gough, Barbie Greenshields, Catherine Grundy, Beth Hatton, Glenys Hodgeman, Osmond Kantilla, Naomi Kantjuri, Kay Lawrence, Susan Mader, Petra Meer, Sophie Morris, Michelle Nikou, Toby Richardson, Nalda Searles, Holly Story, Bede Tungatalem, Wilma Walker, Ilka White, Irmina van Niele, Rosemary Whitehead, Liz Williamson.


Since 1976 the Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial has developed from a survey exhibition showing the most innovative fibre textile works from the previous two years to a curated exhibition recognised nationally as Australia’s pre-eminent textile related exhibition.

For the 17th Biennial, titled In the World: head, hand, heart, Vivonne Thwaites presents a textile exhibition exploring themes as diverse as individuality and identity politics, belonging and our place in the world, gender and sexuality, the environment and the increasing insularity and disconnectedness of much contemporary life.

“Textiles are the oldest and most ubiquitous of humanity’s expressive media,” Thwaites states in her catalogue essay.

“Textiles have been essential to human existence to cover the body, for warmth and for shelter. They are part of every person’s everyday experience, and many of us have had the pleasure of making clothes and household items for our own use.”

“This familiarity, and their long shared history with people, is what makes textiles such an effective medium for artists. The fact that they are rooted in the everyday gives them a tremendous advantage. People are not overawed by them in the way they might be by painting, photo-media or computer-generated artforms.”

Professor Kay Lawrence, who officially opened the exhibition in Tamworth, noted “while this is a textile biennial, the materials used by the artists range further than cloth and fibre to include paint, paper, plastics, shell, buttons, feathers, salt. But what they have in common with textiles is they are generally materials found near at hand; collected on walks in the country, on the beach, found in the kitchen or the shed, discovered in the button box, the linen cupboard, or rag-bag. They are ordinary, familiar materials that have been transformed through imaginative making, to help us see the world anew.”

“In its relatively short history, the Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial has gone through significant growth stages, having grown from a local event celebrating the work of regional artists and craftspeople, to a national survey of the work of Australia’s most progressive and acclaimed fibre artists,” said Elizabeth McIntosh, Director of Tamworth Regional Gallery.

A Tamworth Regional Gallery exhibition toured by Museums & Galleries NSW

TOUR DATES
NEXT VENUE
Flinders University Art Museum,
Flinders University SA
20 June 3 August 2008

Next Venues

Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery, Swan Hill VIC
29 August to 12 October 2008

Orange Regional Gallery, Orange NSW
21 November to 14 January 2009

BELOW:
Toby Richardson
Unknown, Brooklyn Park 5032
2005
Giclee print on etching paper
from the series
Singles, Couples and Queens

There’s a saying that ‘ones trash is another treasure’.

Throughout the year the suburban streets of Adelaide are littered with peoples unwanted goods as they await their council’s hard waste collection. Streets that where previously tranquil erupt with commotion as neighbours and strangers fossick through what some consider trash in search of treasure.

As a photographer I document everyday life. I’m intrigued by most things others consider mundane, I’m interested in everyday objects and customs, my camera allows me to uncover the stories/messages these objects and customs possess. For the past year this desire has seen me documenting people’s hard waste. In doing so, I became interested in ruminants of everyday life, particularly peoples discarded mattresses. These objects bear the traces of intensive use they show the imprints and marks of the life in which they had a function. They are individually stained with their owners sweat and urine, each mattress has its own unique signature that distinguishes it from any other mattress. I photograph the mattresses as they lie amongst the hard waste, and then ask for permission from the owner(s) if I can take their mattress to my studio to photograph on transparency with my large format camera. Once the images where shot and scanned at a high resolution I’m able to print the mattresses actual size on German etching paper. These images become portraits of their previous owner’s every thread counts, button counts, stains and tear counts, it is as if the mattresses are there. This work captures the remarkable individuality of each mattress, in their fabric design, age and history. They fuse image with texture; some are stunningly decorative; others rich with colour. Whilst in opposition to this beauty, there are elements that are indicative of the abject. There’s the sweat and urine stains; evidence of water damage and wear-and-tear these elements remind us that mattresses are unclean.

More than half of the sixty mattresses I have shot come with a story attributed to their donors, in many cases random comments made during a chat on the doorstep as I attempted to acquire my subjects. Narratives that permit the viewer entry and ownership to this body of work, considering one's own 'mattress story' – because we all have one.

OFFICIAL OPENING SPEECH
KAY LAWRENCE AM
In the World: head, hand, heart
17th Tamworth Textile Biennial 2006

As presented at Tamworth Regional Gallery September 2006

"The title of this 17th Tamworth Textile Biennial In the World: head, hand, heart talks about the integration of the self in the world, rather than the Cartesian separating out of mind and body, that has been so prevalent in Western thought. And it gives equal weight to emotion.

As any artist knows, creating an artwork is an emotional business. It’s often a journey into the unknown, you don’t quite know where you’re going, but you’re driven by the desire to find something out. It’s a journey that is undertaken physically, mentally and emotionally. You make your way working with your body your hands, shaping materials to try and express some half conscious thought. If you didn’t have some emotional investment in the journey you’d be easily put off, as the way can take you up frustrating dead-ends requiring you to re-think your destination, back-track and try another route.

Of course when things go well there’s a wonderful synergy between the idea and its expression, and a sense of exhilaration, a moment when head, hand and heart are truly one.

Although memory and imagination enable us to cast our minds into the past and the future, our bodies remind us that we live our lives in the present, in the here and now. And evidence of the body is everywhere in this exhibition, from textiles that show evidence of bodily use, to processes that remind us of the body’s rhythms.

Almost all of the works involve repetition, in the structure of the work or in the making processes; the rhythmic repetition of line across line in cross hatching, stitch after tiny stitch in embroidery, loop upon loop in knitting, repeatedly pricking holes to make a pattern, pushing rags through spaces in a grid.

These repetitive movements are deeply aligned with the body’s rhythms, the pulse of blood, the inhalation and exhalation of breath. Perhaps the experience of seeing these works, unconsciously recognising their relation to our own somatic selves, grounds us in the present moment. If it does, it also grounds us in the everyday.

While this is a textile biennial, the materials used by the artists range further than cloth and fibre to include paint, paper, plastics, shell, buttons, feathers, salt. But what they have in common with textiles is they are generally materials found near at hand; collected on walks in the country, on the beach, found in the kitchen or the shed, discovered in the button box, the linen cupboard, or rag-bag. They are ordinary, familiar materials that have been transformed through imaginative making, to help us see the world anew.


And what are these works telling us, about ourselves and the world.

• That many of us feel a deep connection to place. Whether it’s connection to country renewed through the making of images and objects, or connection through memory to the places of childhood, or attraction to liminal spaces, like the coast, that that heighten our awareness of being part of the flux and movement of life
.
• I think they’re also telling us that we must recognise the complexities of our history: the loss that accompanies immigration, the damaging effects of white settlement in unsettling the lives of Indigenous Australians as well as the delicate ecological balance of the country.

• On a more personal level, these works affirm the importance of connection between people while recognising the loss that inevitably shadows all our relationships.

• And finally, as curator Vivonne Thwaites says in her introduction, the works in the exhibition speak of the wonderful ‘unruliness of everyday life’ and the importance of recognising our common humanity, our interrelatedness in the present moment, in the world."

BELOW
Irmina Van Niele
Carrying Loss
2006
5 elements
found plastic shopping bags, cut and knitted

This work references loss, as the unknown. Not an uncharted, undiscovered realm, but in the sense of what has been forgotten, ignored, misunderstood, gone unnoticed, been hidden, repressed. That which is lost and yet carried across, brought along, perhaps unconsciously even. It is a peculiar kind of baggage, of nothing, of loss.

Loss is odd: an absence that is something nonetheless. Something that was once present and now is not, but experienced all the same, as lack. Loss may carry memories; it may not. It may be a forgetting, or forgotten experience. So loss remains present in the world for a while and is carried as a gap, an emptiness, a hiatus.

Memories lead to stories, telling yarns.

Yarn: thread, story, tale

Knitting carries associations with story telling: the rhythmic back and forth of knitting rows is like an ongoing saga, without words, of things lost, found and attached. Knitting forms part of the sense of narrative present in the fabric of domestic continuity. Knitting, as process, links to memories of domestic interiors, where garments were largely homemade and worn jumpers re-knitted. Now lost. I remember knitting taking place, articulating necessity, familiarity and continuity; that which was presently worn out or lacking was about to be provided anew. And the new, as repetition, continually fastened to the previous, is reassuring.

Knitting belongs to the in-between: it can be picked up and continued or left any time, between things. Slowing down within the process of knitting produces a sense of connection to a history of things. And in knitting is included both the process and the fabric that results, but how to knit absence? How to knit loss?

I knit bags. Bags belong to the everyday ways of being in the world, to journeys, movements to and fro. They allude to an elsewhere, somewhere left behind, or a destination not yet reached. But these bags are not in use, they are still, suspended, perhaps waiting, hanging at the ready… they too may have been left behind, lost in the world…

Bags are for holding, and for carrying across. Their emptiness may indicate loss, yet offers potential for plenitude too: receptive, open towards the future (who knows what may be found or need to be brought, or bought) while carrying the past, as absence. So that past, present and future intertwine, are knitted together.

Then there is a sense of stillness between movements, where loss as experience is held, suspended between losing and finding, arriving and leaving, a transient trace of belonging.