Textile Art With A Bold Australian Look
The Age
Monday August 8, 1994
Crossroads: An exhibition of printed fabric lengths. Meat Market Craft Centre until 24 August. Patrick Snelling: Sensibilities, Ideas on Cloth. Craft Victoria until 20 August.
HAND-PRINTED textile lengths, too rarely exhibited, are then seldom displayed to best advantage. With Crossroads, the Meat Market Craft Centre triumphs. There are more than 60 spectacular fabrics by 32 adventurous Australian textile designers filling the vast main hall.
Thirty years ago virtually all that textile design graduates could look forward to was employment in one of the few remaining factories where designs were adapted or bought in from overseas: abstract furnishing fabric patterns from Scandinavia and floral dress prints from Italy, Switzerland and the US. Ausralia's fashion industry still followed European and American trends. Pioneering designers like Prue Acton - among the first to commission hand-printed local designs - would soon emerge, but influence from Asia was unthought of.
Though silk-screening is the principal process used to transfer their ideas to selected silks, cottons, linens and other fabrics, many of the participants have used additional techniques to enhance their designs. Most - like shibori resist (tie dyeing), batik (hand-painted or stencilled wax resist dyeing) and wood-block printing - are methods learnt directly from Asia. Knowledge of the textile traditions of Japan, India and South-East Asia has burgeoned in recent decades.
However, most of the lengths have a bold, unmistakeably Australian look, uncompromising in wit, humor, color and uninhibited personal expression rather than demonstrating oriental discretion and good taste. Yoka Aarts and Heather Beech, for instance, take tie-dyeing about as far as it will go, creating huge splashy abstracts with ambitious titles like `Metropolis' or `Ascent in Pink'. Tony Dyer's sonorous red, purple and blue abstractions hand-painted on to Fuji silk and silk-twill, and entitled `No Two Crossings Are the Same' and `New Territory beneath the Grid', must be tributes to the late Roger Kemp, a painter whose obsession with circles and crosses was enthusiastically communicated to all who knew him. He would not, I think, be displeased by these fabrics.
`Apples and Pears', Simone Wetherhog's hand-painted batik on very wide canvas, is executed in gorgeous soft autumn tones of orange, lime and grey-green. Using batik, block-printing and traditional Indonesian- inspired spacer patterns in madder and indigo colors, Micheal Heap produces humorous contemporary patterns made up of fashionable advertising images like crowns, lips, high-heeled shoes, tank-tops and jocks. Thus tradition is cleverly internationalised for the wider markets sought by outstanding designers such as Heap and Weatherhog.
Environmentally motivated and strongly personalised pieces by Roze Elisabeth and a textile construction entitled `Your Number Is Up' by Patrick Snelling provide the most powerful images in the show. The latter, printed on a calico base using heat-sensitive inks, which create an unpleasant raised and rubbery surface, presents regiments of dead ducks plummeting to earth along with their pottery cards.
Snelling patches, collages and machine-stitches the images into a quasi-political banner with reverse printed borders. This memorable work provides an introduction to his concurrent exhibition at Craft Victoria.
Snelling's `Sensibilities' exhibition is conceived as an instructive, though not didactic, installation with multiple references to textiles, their qualities, traditional uses and new possibilities. If there's a major influence here, it is Pop Art and its post-modern repercussions. He calls up popular consumer icons - vacuum cleaner, clothes washer, electric-iron etc - as recurring motifs whose cool, serialised, computer-designed, screen-printed exactitude clashes with the delicate natural textures of cotton and silk.
Snelling's exhibition challenges those who think that textiles, prints and embroideries are necessarily gentle arts incapable of drama, irony and political impact. By coaxing, coercing and constructing cloth in ways that affect the spectator's emotions, he confronts our important but under-examined psychological responses to the materials we regularly have around us.
© 1994 The Age