Pliable Planes: Expanded Textiles & Fibre Practices will be on show in Ballarat from 4 March 2023 – 30 April 2023.
A major exhibition of work by twelve leading Australian artists who reimagine textiles and fibre art is coming to the Art Gallery of Ballarat from 4 March 2023 – 30 April 2023, becoming the first venue of a national tour of this exhibition from UNSW Galleries in Sydney.
The exhibition, Pliable Planes: Expanded Textiles & Fibre Practices includes new commissions and recent works by Akira Akira, Sarah Contos, Lucia Dohrmann, Mikala Dwyer, Janet Fieldhouse, Teelah George, Paul Knight, Anne-Marie May, John Nixon, Kate Scardifield, Jacqueline Stojanović, and Katie West. It is co-curated by Karen Hall and Catherine Woolley.
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The exhibition takes its title from a 1957 essay by celebrated Bauhaus artist Anni Albers who sought to rethink weaving through the lens of architecture, interpreting textiles as fundamentally structural and endlessly mutable. The exhibition presents works that experiment with materiality, spatial fluidity, and process and features painting, assemblage, sculpture, video, sound, and installation. It reflects artists’ use of textiles and fibre to chart social and cultural change, respond to historical modes of production and representation, and test formal properties through weaving, embroidery, knitting, and sewing.
Exhibition co-curator Karen Hall explains: “The exhibition unites the work of practitioners who disrupt our understanding of how textiles and fibre are defined and used in contemporary practice. The exhibition highlights dynamic approaches to making from artists who weave with porcelain, unravel paintings on canvas, and create sonic representations of needlepoint.”
Credit: Jacquie Manning
Gallery Director Louise Tegart said that the exhibition complemented the Gallery’s own exhibition programming and Ballarat’s status as a UNESCO City of Craft and Folk Art.
“We are delighted to be presenting this stunning exhibition which showcases and celebrates creativity and pushing boundaries in the realm of textiles. “We are particularly interested in showing work that takes a current artform and takes it into new areas of discovery and creativity. The exhibition connects with the celebration of fibre art that is part of Ballarat’s UNESCO status, showing what is happening at the forefront of textile and fibre in this country.”
UNSW Galleries commissioned eight artists to create new works for the project. They include Sarah Contos, who subverts conceptions of weaving or knitting as a ‘soft’ practice by casting in aluminium while also incorporating her signature DIY aesthetic and Kate Scardifield who has created a new dual-channel video activating a ‘textile wind instrument’ that explores the interplay between body and material, the natural elements and landscape.
The exhibition also features important collaborative works by John Nixon and Jacqueline Stojanović. Nixon completed half of the collaboration before his death in 2020, and Stojanović finished her part in 2021. The works combine their respective practices — constructed painting and weaving — evidencing the enduring exploration of abstraction across different generations.
“We are excited to support ambitious new works for the project that embody and expand upon histories and practices. Whether interrogating modernist weaving theories or exploring connections to First Nations fibre practices, exhibiting artists navigate the continued social and cultural significance of textiles through a range of experimental and unexpected approaches,” says co-curator Catherine Woolley. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication designed by Small Tasks featuring new scholarship by writers and curators Sophia Cai, Katie Dyer, and Vikki McInnes.
‘Pliable Planes: Expanded Textiles & Fibre Practices’ is a UNSW Galleries touring exhibition presented with the support of the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia touring initiative, the Australia Council for the Arts, and Museums & Galleries NSW on behalf of the NSW Government.
Pliable Planes: Expanded Textiles & Fibre Practices arrives at the Art Gallery of Ballarat March 4 and run until April 30 2023. Bookings and more information via artgalleryofballarat.com.au/
