Swish Swatches
The Age
Friday September 16, 1994
A new RMIT archive will should help revalue the creative credentials of fabric designers, reports BARBARA HOOKS. Photograph by Angela Wylie.
IMAGINE IT. A piece of fabric so valuable, so prized, that Popes commission it for the decoration of their chapels, connoisseurs bid deca-millions for it at auction, or the Louvre protects it behind everything-proof glass.
In the 20th century, fabrics have been relegated to a place between the linen closet and craft. But, according to some contemporary textile experts, they once enjoyed the same status and worth as paintings and sculpture in the 15th century.
While they may not easily regain such aesthetic high ground as, say, Botticelli's Venus, textiles are enjoying a resurgence of interest and appreciation, says Robyn Oswald-Jacobs, research coordinator of a new archive at RMIT.
The Textile Resource Collection was launched in February but conceived in 1989, when the head of the fashion and textile design department, associate professor Janet Medd, travelled overseas to study textile resource archives, notably the Courtauld Institute in London and the Fashion Institute archives in New York.
Coincidentally, while researching the seminal Australian textile designer Frances Burke and her associates for a masters degree, Oswald-Jacobs became aware of a wealth of archival material in danger of being lost or destroyed. It was clearly time to act.
The Textile Resource Collection aims to include ``anything pertaining to textile in the 20th century" - textile and fashion designers, the manufacturing and production industries, and the retail and wholesale networks that supported them. It is a huge area, with obvious overlaps, which is why the collection has to be selective about what it takes. It is not a gallery or a museum. It does not acquire three- dimensional pieces such as costumes or accessories. Rather, it tells a contemporary textile story through samples and swatches, lengths of fabric to four metres, press clippings, photographs, slides, old newsreels, video, film and taped oral histories.
The resource collection is also part of a wider network. It has lists of collections held in other galleries and museums. It takes material they cannot accept, or disperses treasures that rightfully belong in other archives.
The contents of the Textile Resource Collection are still being catalogued, but among its treasures is the work of Frances Burke, MBE, who set up Australia's first silk-screen printery in 1937. ``She was one of the forerunners in the use of wonderfully bright colors," says Oswald-Jacobs, who has interviewed Ms Burke. ``She had 52 colors in her range, which was pretty stunning, and she produced a range of plain dyed fabrics which were fabulous. She had a very good approach to marketing. She had furniture by Grant Featherstone and other designers of the day in her studio and she displayed her fabrics with them. She was also pretty alert to the idea that houses of the time were being built with new materials. They were flooded with light and needed fabrics that fitted into that context."
Also represented is Ailsa Graham, who, with her designer, Beverley Knox, made homewares between 1947 and 1958 after their graduation from RMIT in dye chemistry and design. ``They are significant because they put together a business," says Oswald-Jacobs. ``They supplied Georges and David Jones, they did scarves and handkerchiefs for the 1956 Olympics, and they reflected a growing interest in Aboriginality, sparked by Frances Burke in the '40s."
There are also pieces by Englishman Michael O'Connell, who travelled Australia in the '20s and '30s producing colorful and lively batiks and lino cuts. ``The dye chemistry was so good and the fabrics of such quality that pieces we hold now, of Burke's, Graham's and O'Connell's, are still wonderfully vibrant, despite years of use and commercial laundering."
As a condition of funding through the Department of Education, Employment and Training, access to the collection is so wide that it includes the general public. But it is of special relevance to students of the visual arts, interior design, architecture, textile and fashion design, and those with a particular interest in Australian cultural heritage, such as theatrical and costume designers.
Oswald-Jacobs, who has her own textile design business supplying homewares to David Jones, House and Matchbox, says the collection will be the basis for a range of activities. ``We want to take an area of interest and do as much as we can to promote it with talks, slides and publications," she says. ``It might be costume design, or scarves, which tell us so much about our history, or the work of a particular designer."
Or of a particular period, such as 1940 to 1950, which will be covered in a talk on Thursday 6 October.
The work of textile designers and their importance to Australia is under-recognised, says Oswald-Jacobs. Textile design reflects the culture, social history and feeling of the people. Textiles keep us warm; they cocoon us. As a decorative art, they also fulfill an aesthetic need for richness and finery. ``We wanted to show that Australia not only had a textile heritage, but also an excellent one, with the wool industry, initially, then the growing cotton industry, and the fashion industry, which has been interesting and productive if somewhat plagiaristic at times."
The homewares boom and feminism have increased our appreciation of fabrics and their design. ``There's been a real interest in tracking the lives and careers of women in the arts," Oswald-Jacobs says. ``So many of the textile designers have been women. Australia's textile history was craft-based, not industry-based. People joined arts and crafts societies, they travelled and studied fine art, learnt to screen print or do lino cuts and brought their skills back here.
Textile designers didn't exist to serve the industry. We didn't have an industry until the 1940s, and that was partly influenced by the fact that imports were so impossible during the war."
Times change. When Oswald-Jacobs studied for her diploma of art at RMIT, she says educators could not decide whether textiles fitted into fine art or industrial design. Now, she says, courses are much more focused and vibrant. ``The marketplace reacts to what it's shown. I would like to see the general public shown better-designed work, and I think it's coming, through media publicity and education, the vitality of courses in institutions, a better understanding of industry needs and a greater awareness of student talent. Appreciation follows and that's a role the resource centre has to play."
© 1994 The Age