‘About Time’ surveys the development of Australian studio tapestry from 1975 to 2005. The exhibition principally features large-scale tapestries from Ararat Regional Art Gallery’s post 1970s collection to track the development of what is arguably the pre-eminent field of Australian textile art practice. In the context of the exhibition, the term ‘studio tapestry’ refers to artist-weavers independently designing and weaving their own tapestries outside of a collaborative workshop framework.
Prior to the establishment of the Victorian Tapestry Workshop (VTW) 1 in 1976, tapestry weaving in Australia was pursued by a small number of self taught or overseas-trained practitioners. The VTW provided training and paid employment for aspiring weavers who were generally charged with realising tapestries from designs made by non-weaving artists. Throughout their careers, many artist-weavers have maintained a symbiotic relationship with the VTW; however, other artist-weavers have pursued their own practice without any connection to the VTW. Nonetheless, the influence of the VTW remains a significant factor in the establishment and development of the studio tapestry field in Australia.
The establishment of tapestry courses at university and TAFE also influenced the development of the field, as did the arrival of international artists who came to Australia to consult, teach and pursue their own practice. 2 Through a range of examples from Ararat’s permanent collection and other public and private collections, ‘About Time’ highlights the key influences and formal and conceptual concerns that have shaped the character of independent tapestry production in Australia during this formative period.
The exhibition begins with Roma Center’s wall hanging, ‘Basic Forms in Black and White’ (1975). Center was an abstract painter, working as Roma Thompson, who bought a loom and taught herself to weave, initially to take a teaching job. 3 Her woven work was included in the National Gallery of Victoria’s ‘Craft Victoria 75’ exhibition which toured to regional galleries. Center’s work arrived at Ararat Gallery in September 1975 and was subsequently acquired for the permanent collection. In the ‘Craft Victoria 75’ catalogue, Center applied the term ‘non-traditional tapestry’ to describe her work, which was woven on a treadle loom and would mostly not conform to what we would define as a tapestry today. 4
Center created this non-traditional tapestry one year before the establishment of the VTW in 1976; a momentous event that was preceded by a convergence of influences including tapestry exhibitions at public and commercial galleries 5 and the pioneering efforts of independent artist-weavers, particularly in New South Wales. 6 In addition to these influences, Diana Wood Conroy records how tapestry in Australia became allied to a range of disparate fibre practices in the 1970s, which defined tapestry by its materials and techniques but overlooked its European cultural origins and codified production standards. 7
The VTW’s founding director Sue Walker has also written that, “…the aesthetic climate and the lifestyle of the 1970s as reflected in the arts and crafts were free, expressive, and back to the earth. Spontaneous explorations of materials were often taken up as the leading work of the day: the concept of an art that required a high level of technical skill, a finely tuned aesthetic sensibility, and the discipline to work seriously over long hours was not in step with the times”. 8 Despite the fundamental differences between tapestry and other areas of fibre art practice, major commissions of fibre wall hangings in the early 1970s should be acknowledged for their contribution to building awareness of the potential for textiles to humanise public spaces, 9 which was a key idea underpinning the establishment of the VTW.
The fibre art aesthetic of Center’s loosely woven non-traditional tapestry contrasts markedly with Marie Cook’s weft-faced tapestry, ‘Sunbather’ (1977), which represents the shape of things to come. ‘Sunbather’s’ sophisticated design and technical proficiency is the product of Cook’s rapid skill development and deep immersion in the culture of tapestry weaving at the VTW. 10 Cook’s tapestry is an exploration of the body with reference to geometric abstraction; one of many tapestries in ‘About Time’ which reflect a dialogue with the wider realm of the visual arts.
'Sunbather' 1977
woven tapestry; wool, cotton 180 x 150 cm
Collection of Ararat Regional Art Gallery
Purchased with the assistance of the Crafts Board of the Australia Council, 1978
As Cook’s ‘Sunbather’ shows, the training and opportunities the VTW provided to its weavers was essential to the development of the studio tapestry field in the 1970s. Early tapestries from the studio practices of VTW foundation weavers Liz Nettleton and Merrill Dumbrell provide further evidence of this influence. Nettleton’s large tapestry ‘White Diamond’ (1978), from the Tamworth Regional Gallery collection, presents an intersecting pattern of diamonds in a subtle gradation from red to white. Dumbrell’s ‘Trifid Nebula’ (1977-78) and ‘Congo’ (1985) offer more strident expositions on repetition, geometry and colour. These tapestries exist somewhere between geometric abstraction and a more traditional textile design aesthetic.
In 2004 Ararat Regional Art Gallery became custodian of the textile fibre components of the Victorian State Craft Collection (VSCC). The VSCC was established in 1979 and acquired textile fibre art up until 1991, however it only ever acquired studio tapestries made in 1977 and 1978. 11 The eagerness to develop the VSCC and the looming profile of the VTW at the time may have coalesced to influence the purchase of tapestries by Marie Cook, Tess Crawford, Merrill Dumbrell, Alan Holland, Sara Lindsay, Belinda Ramson and Cheryl Thornton. Presented together in the exhibition these small to medium-sized tapestries reveal the collecting imperative of the VSCC and offer a glimpse into an early period of studio tapestry’s development in Victoria.
Belinda Ramson was a key figure in the development of tapestry in Australia. She had trained at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh with Archie Brennan and was therefore one of the few Australians able to lead the training of the VTW’s foundation weavers, which she did from 1976 to 1978. 12 In addition to ‘Stained Glass Window’ (1978) from the VSCC, Ramson is represented in the exhibition with a work from Ararat’s collection, ‘Tanja I’ (1982). ‘Tanja I’ is part of an ongoing series that explores the representation of landscape through tapestry, with specific reference to the artist’s home in the fertile Bega Valley.
By the 1980s studio tapestry had emerged out of the shadow of the VTW. Many artist-weavers retained their connection to the VTW, while others moved on entirely. The field was enriched by overseas-trained weavers like Valerie Kirk from Scotland, who worked at the VTW in 1979 and maintained her connection with Australia, settling here permanently in 1987. Kirk has sustained a commitment to her practice since the 1980s, while simultaneously contributing to the community tapestry movement and notably to higher education. Kirk’s ‘Bones and Andamooka Landscape’ (1990), from the Riddoch Art Gallery collection, is a bold and graphic depiction of an ancient Australian landscape that explores notions of belonging.
English artist Tass Mavrogodato’s time in Australia was brief, but her highly accomplished tapestries and energetic engagement with postmodernism made a lasting impression. Her exhibition at Christine Abrahams Gallery in 1993 contributed to the re-positioning of studio tapestry in a contemporary art context. ‘It’s Different for Girls’ (1993) contrasts a playful appropriation of imagery from popular culture with a self-referential commentary on the status of women.
Kay Lawrence AM was an emerging Australian artist when she arrived at the Edinburgh College of the Arts to study tapestry weaving in 1977. Like artist-weavers of an earlier generation, Lawrence looked overseas for inspiration and this instilled in her an independence that would later prove important in advancing the wider tapestry field in Australia. Combined with a career as an exhibiting artist, Lawrence also led community tapestry projects, designed and co-coordinated the Parliament House Embroidery in 1988 and became a prominent academic.
Lawrence is represented in ‘About Time’ with a major work, ‘House/Self’ (1989), which explores identity and the line between the personal and the political. The work contains a striking contrast between the immediacy of Lawrence’s mark-making and its translation through the disciplined, time-intensive labour of tapestry. Similarly, Gerda van Hamond’s tapestry ‘Inner and outer searching’ (1994), from the Hamilton Art Gallery collection, has a painterly appearance derived from the artist-weaver’s own gestural painting which exists as a related, yet separate artwork. The status of the source material that informs a final tapestry is a question that artist-weavers each approach differently. Richard Larter, an artist who collaborated with the VTW, was unequivocal about the matter: he famously and ceremonially burned his tapestry cartoons because of ‘his firm belief that a tapestry should exist in its own right’.13
The ‘return to figuration’ in painting in the 1980s influenced Australian tapestry, but by the 1990s there was a greater acceptance of diversity and a further rejection of notions of art historical progress. This climate created new opportunities for tapestry that were advanced in ‘Texts from the Edge’, an influential touring exhibition curated by Marie Cook, Kay Lawrence and Diana Wood Conroy in 1995 that featured twelve women artist-weavers. 14 Compared with the introspection of some craft communities, this outward looking claim to art world legitimacy served to reposition Australian studio tapestry during a challenging time. The exhibition provided recognition and consolidation for established artist-weavers, and a springboard to re-invention for early and mid-career artist-weavers.
Kate Derum came to tapestry later in her artistic career, but her impact on the field and especially on the young artists she taught at Monash University was profound. Her five solo exhibitions at Gallery 101 in Melbourne from1997 to 2005 helped forge new pathways for studio tapestry artists. She is represented in this exhibition with ‘In the Heat of the Moment’ (1998), a richly symbolic work that uses the Persian gabbeh rug as a conceptual and compositional device. A series of opposites are at play in a boxed tableau of counter-narratives that flank and enrich the central composition and promote an open interpretation of the work.
Diana Wood Conroy has stated that people tend to view tapestries as if they are paintings. She writes, “The problem with this is that tapestries are seen to lack the qualities of painting while viewers remain insensitive to the language of woven technique”. 15 Since the 1990s studio tapestry artists have increasingly developed a visual language more in tune with the weaving process itself, exploring tapestry’s materiality and formal characteristics as core conceptual concerns.
Catherine K’s ‘The Price of Fish’ (1996), from the Artbank collection, features a weft of newspaper which reveals the slowness of the tapestry weaving process in contrast to the disposability of newspaper, the ‘rapidity of the read text’ 16 and the dynamism of language itself. Woven from an unlikely weft of gingham fabric, Sara Lindsay’s ‘In-Between #2’ (1999) visually captures the linear, time-bound nature of the weaving process through the orderly interplay of gingham’s black and white checks, which is only disrupted by a central, vertical arrangement of red dots. Lindsay is another important figure notable for raising the status of studio tapestry in a wider contemporary art context through frequent exhibitions and curatorial projects in both Victoria and Tasmania.
Tapestries by Kate Derum and Sara Lindsay were only recently acquired with a view to strengthening Ararat Regional Art Gallery’s tapestry sub-collection. However, the Gallery is yet to acquire tapestries from the 2000s, therefore selected tapestries representing the work of Robyn Daw, Tim Gresham 17, Cresside Collette and Mardi Nowak have been loaned to represent this period.
Tim Gresham’s ambitious ‘Triptych from Red’ (2002) explores the tension between the immediacy of photography and the slowness of the weaving process, distilling compositional elements from photographs to create non-representational tapestries. Robyn Daw’s ‘Speed’ (2001) appears to be a hard-edge artwork embodying the universal language of abstraction, but on closer inspection references to domestic, utilitarian textiles design schemes emerge and replace the universal with the particular. In different ways, Gresham and Daw investigate the formal possibilities of abstraction with reference to tapestry’s underlying grid of warp and weft.
Cresside Collette and Mardi Nowak explore gender and identity, though in different ways. Collette, a VTW foundation weaver, explores art historical representations of the body in ‘Uniting Venus and Mars’ (2001) to comment on how fabric in art history variously conceals or reveals the human body with reference to contemporary ways of seeing. Mardi Nowak’s ‘Playing the Game’ (2005-06) appropriates fashion and celebrity magazine imagery and reconfigures it in collages which inform her tapestries. Nowak preserves disposable moments from popular culture in tapestry – an art form associated with power, prestige and permanence - in a teasing conflation of high and popular culture that is characteristic of recent tapestry by younger artist-weavers.
‘About Time’ brings together many striking examples of studio tapestry to highlight a unique and significant area of Australian artistic endeavour. Some notable artist-weavers are not included in the exhibition, while others are represented with very major works. The identification of collection strengths and weaknesses has been one of the most valuable outcomes of the exhibition’s curatorial process. Overall the depth, quality and potential for the future development of Ararat’s unique sub-collection bodes well for its sustained expansion as a significant repository for Australian studio tapestry into the future.
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Anthony Camm
Director
Ararat Regional Art Gallery
July 2010
This essay was first published in the exhibition catalogue for “About Time: Australian Studio Tapestry 1975-2005” - an Ararat Regional Art Gallery touring exhibition presented at the following Victorian public galleries:
Ararat Regional Art Gallery – 12 August – 26 September 2010
Horsham Regional Art Gallery - 22 January to 6 March 2011
Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery - 1 July to 14 August 2011
Central Goldfields Art Gallery, Maryborough - 4 September to 9 October 2011
Footnotes
1 The Victorian Tapestry Workshop was renamed the Australian Tapestry Workshop in 2010.
2 Sue Walker, Artists’ Tapestries from Australia 1976-2005, The Beagle Press, Roseville, NSW, 2007, pages 31, 33 35, 38. Archie Brennan from Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh was the chief consultant advising on the VTW’s establishment. Brennan and Dovecot-trained Australian weaver Belinda Ramson provided its first weavers with specialist training.
3 Telephone conversation with Roma Center, 17 July 2010
4 Craft Victoria ‘75: A survey of contemporary Victorian crafts, National Gallery of Victoria, 1975, page 64
5 Sue Walker, Artists’ Tapestries from Australia 1976-2005, page 14-20
6 Diana Wood Conroy in Texts from the Edge (exhibition catalogue), Jam Factory Craft and Design Centre, Adelaide, 1995, page 1
7 Diana Wood Conroy, Texts from the Edge, page 7
8 Sue Walker, Artists’ Tapestries..., page 42
9 ‘Feddersen tapestry at Opera House’, Craft Australia, Vol 3/2, December 1973 - January 1974, page 13. Jutta Feddersen’s 275 x 853 cm tapestry was ‘woven in natural fibes, jute, sisal and manilla rope’ for the Sydney Opera House boardroom in 1973 and is an significant example of a woven fibre wall hanging referred to as a tapestry, only three years before the establishment of the VTW.
10 Craft Victoria ‘75, page 66. Marie Cook’s rapid development as a weaver is evident when ‘Sunbather’ (1977) is compared to ‘Juggler’ (1974) – her contribution to ‘Craft Victoria 75’.
11 The Victorian State Craft Collection also includes Mike Brown’s ‘Untitled’ (1982) – a VTW tapestry woven by Cheryl Thornton, Sonja Hansen and Irja West.
12 Diana Wood Conroy, Texts from the Edge, page 17
13 Sue Walker, Modern Australian Tapestries from the Victorian Tapestry Workshop, The Beagle Press, Roseville, NSW, 2000, page 48
14 The artists represented in ‘Texts from the Edge’ were Leonie Besant, Marie Cook, Robyn Daw, Meryn Jones, Catherine K, Valerie Kirk, Kay Lawrence, Sara Lindsay, Tass Mavrogordato, Liz Nettleton, Belinda Ramson and Diana Wood Conroy.
15 Diana Wood Conroy, Contexts and Images: Kay Lawrence’s tapestry ‘House / Self’ considered as an artefact (paper), 1991, page 5
16 Wood Conroy, Texts from the Edge, page 11
17 Tim Gresham’s ‘Triptych from Red (2002) has since been acquired by Ararat Regional Art Gallery with the support of the Robert Salzer Foundation.
