TEXTURE: Canberra Contemporary Art Space

Haji Oh

4 Feb - 1 Apr 2023

TEXTURE
Canberra Contemporary Art Space
44 Queen Elizabeth Terrace Parkes ACT 2601

From fashion and home décor to agriculture and the medical field, textiles permeate every facet of human life. Textiles are used to proclaim ideas – bringing together people under the banners of their collective purpose; to pass down histories – using native materials to weave familial stories into wall hangings and tapestries; and to decorate – flashy fashion can also investigate community, agency, and domesticity.

The exhibition includes a series of vignettes of ‘care’ featuring skeleton clothes and manipulated cloths by Jane Bodnaruk, a work of Indigenous symbology communicated through coconut fibre, emu feathers, and vines by Nadeena Dixon, a monument to lost female voices in the form of 65 hand knitted individual panels by Kate Just that proclaim ‘Anonymous was a woman’, an immersive installation of tapestries that tell a story of identity and homelands by Haji Oh, a large patchwork that perfectly interweaves biology and design by Alia Parker and a playful installation of large crochet artworks that crawl along the gallery walls and floor by Chrys Zantis.

Curator Dan Toua says of the exhibition: “Before the rise of widespread ‘craftivism’ in the early 2000’s, textiles and craft had been relegated to being forms of ‘low art’ due to craft being seen as women’s work, or domestic art. Now, textiles and fibre artists are using this often dismissed medium to examine feminism, environmentalism, anti-capitalism and beyond. This exhibition showcases textile artists that push their materials past their boundaries, with artworks that invite us to question, examine and explore all that textiles can do and be.”