Ever since the Edinburgh tradition of woven tapestry was introduced into South Eastern Australia through a series of intensive workshops conducted first by Belinda Ramson 1 and then Archie Brennan 2 in the mid 1970s, artist-weavers have played a significant role in the development of Australian tapestry through creating their own tapestries and through teaching in higher education and in the community. While the fundamental skills of tapestry weaving can be taught in a relatively short time, it can take decades to refine and develop these skills into a nuanced language capable of expressing the most subtle or complex ideas. It takes time and constant practice to develop this fluency, and ironically, as the constraints of the higher education system have eroded the studio time available for teaching and practicing these skills, it’s been through the distance based tapestry program conducted by the South West College of TAFE in Warrnambool, and community based projects often led by artist-weavers teaching in higher education, that the practice of tapestry weaving has flourished in southern Australia. The first community tapestry in Australia was initiated at Salisbury Teachers College in 1981 3 bringing student teachers and staff together to weave ‘The Salisbury Community Tapestry’, a collaborative work that depicted their connection to place through a woven map. A number of participants in the project then went on to create tapestries for their own communities, passing on their skills and working collaboratively to create tapestries that expressed community identity. In this way tapestry weaving was spread by artist-weavers and community participants across the state, one project generating another, creating a rhizomic network of community tapestries, a pattern common to both South Australia and Victoria that continues today. 4 As well as passing on the skills of tapestry weaving community tapestry projects became sites for creating a sense of community identity through the collaborative process and the iconography of the tapestries themselves. For example in the 1980s ‘place’ was an important signifier of identity in community tapestries, perhaps reflecting an interest in the period of Australia’s ‘settlement’ highlighted by sesquicentenary and bicentenary celebrations held between 1985 to 1988. During this period artist-weavers like Valerie Kirk and Kay Lawrence led community tapestry projects that explored how communities both shape and are shaped by their environment. In 1985 Kirk led a community tapestry project to celebrate Portland’s 150th anniversary, creating a set of tapestries that depicted a town built on the resources of land and sea. Around the same time in 1984-1985 Lawrence and Shirley Benlow were working with the Millicent community in South Australia to create their sesquicentenary tapestry, a work that also depicted a town at the centre of an agricultural landscape, but in this case, above a frieze of endangered plant and bird species that hinted at the environmental cost of such development.
This interest in ‘place’ is also reflected in Kirk and Lawrence’s own tapestries woven around that time, tapestries that acknowledge Aboriginal history and occupation, but draw upon European traditions to explore the artists’ own relationship to place as white Australians. Kirk in her 1988 tapestry ‘Mootwingee’ depicted plants entwined amongst Aboriginal rock carvings in the tradition of mille fleur tapestry, while between 1987 and 1988 Lawrence wove ‘Red Gorge, Two Views’ 5 for new Parliament House in Canberra, a work that juxtaposed Aboriginal and European representations of the same country, interwoven through the medium of tapestry. It’s interesting to note, with the benefit of hindsight, that while the work of these artist-weavers was beginning to recognise the primacy of Aboriginal relationship to country in depictions of place, such insights were not yet represented in community tapestries.
It is now almost thirty years since the first community tapestry project, an appropriate time to reflect upon this history and the significance of the community tapestry movement in Australia. In particular, investigating the contribution of artist-weavers to community life and the role of community practice in their own development as artists, as I have touched upon in the examples above, would insert a vital strand into the history of woven tapestry in Australia and build upon the documentation that already exists. 6 Despite the difficulties of maintaining tapestry weaving in undergraduate courses in higher education, the expansion of postgraduate education in the visual art and crafts in universities provides exciting opportunities for graduates to undertake practice-based, historical and theoretical research into tapestry weaving in Australia 7 and to begin to bring this rich history into focus.
Professor Kay Lawrence AM
University of South Australia
July 2010
These three short essays from practising studio tapestry artists are presented under the heading ‘Reflections from the Field’ in the exhibition catalogue, ‘About Time: Australian Studio Tapestry 1975-2005’. ‘About Time’ is 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 Belinda Ramson taught woven tapestry at the Craft Council of South Australia summer schools at Tatachilla in 1975 and 1976.
2 Archie Brennan conducted a workshop in tapestry weaving at Steiglitz, Victoria in 1976.
3 ‘The Salisbury Community Tapestry’ led by Kay Lawrence was created in 1981.
4 ‘The Lobethal Community Tapestry’ designed by Katharina Urban and led by Chris Mackintosh was completed in South Australia in 2009.
5 In weaving ‘Red Gorge, Two Views’ Kay Lawrence was assisted by Jude Stewart, Shirley Benlow, Chris Cochius and Sue Rosenthal.
6 ‘Two Thousand Bobbins’, edited by Valerie Kirk with an introduction by Kathie Muir for the Adelaide Festival Centre Trust, 1988.
7 Kirsty Darlaston will complete her PhD research into ‘The loom as a stage for performing social and cultural meanings of textile craft objects and practices: an investigation of the interaction between the community and artist working in public space’, at the University of South Australia in April 2011. Rosemary Crosthwaite is currently undertaking research into the history of community tapestry for a Masters degree at Monash University.
