No. 223 Karen Gray | Directions
12 November - 18 December
Karen Gray is my sister. She studied law at university and practised law with the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions. Married, raised 2 children with her husband, then late in her law career she noticed an advertisement for classes in quilting. It began her engagement with what she describes as the female craft of quilt making. Before then, Karen remembers being introduced to sewing as a young girl on a visit to our grandparent’s farm in western Queensland. Our Grandmother got out her treadle sewing machine and with her help and the help of our mother she made her first garment. For Karen sewing is a maternal craft.
The group of women Karen studied quilting with became a quilting circle that 20 years later continues to meet monthly. Together they have ridden the joys and tragedies of a woman’s life. Karen described her delight in making quilts for new born babies as a welcome to life and quilting seat-belt-pads for Bosom Buddies, a charity that supports women recovering from breast cancer. She described taking on the job of finishing quilts abandoned by friends, acquaintances and quilting circle colleagues as a sacred duty, a matter of completing life and life’s cycles. Here she found traditions of craft that can be handed on and maintained as a cache of fabric, the raw material of quilts is handed on, woman to woman in a manner that sits outside the pragmatic convenience of modern life.
These quilts are made as gifts for friends and relatives, for family. Traditionally of course they were made as a way of keeping warm on a cold night. Less literally they are a warming of the spirit through the militance of quilt making modes. Here the quilt made as a diamond shaped burst of colour is a traditional pattern referred to as Sunshine and Shadow. The Amish, a religious sect who fled Europe for the USA where they have maintained the austerity of their 18th century lifestyle, invented this pattern of blazing colour that today radiates a warmth at odds with the gratifications of consumerist culture, presently tempered by the necessities of economic rationalism. The quilt made as a row of horizontal bands is derived from a Japanese form. Here the pattern calls for the bands to be spontaneously formed in a manner referred to as crazy
No. 224 Mikha-ez | Colour migrations
18 December – 20 January Curated by Soomin Kim
This is the second collaboration of South Korean, Soomin Kim who is living in Sydney and the Spaniard Mikha-ez.
Their first collaboration, Ventana, a book of photographs began as a list of words. Each responded with a corresponding picture from their place to produce a work that simultaneously reveals the singularity of our world and its cultural diversity. It is a simple gesture that speaks to a clear understanding of our global future.
This, their second work considers the nature of global migration. With a reasoned and modest gesture it confronts the Scott Morrison boast that is presently being taken up in Europe – “I stopped the boats”
Here Mikha-ez’s insightful description of the project bares consideration – At first, it offers…a friendly vision of abstract forms…which could…remind us of works by…the North American minimalists.
Beneath this…a layer remains concealed,… (it) speaks to a harsher reality: the forced human migrations caused by wars, natural catastrophes, searches for freedom...It is the routes generated by these migrations on the cartographic plane that precisely form these seemingly innocuous, beautiful, and contemplative shapes
This work then represents the passage of people from place to place across our planet without the “nationalist spin” crafted by politicians to cement their grasp on power. In this case it is the movement of people across Africa. Another shape could be made of the passage of people along the Malay peninsula, or of migration from China to Australia in the 19th century, or perhaps the biblical Exodus, when the seas parted for the Israelites facilitating their migration from Egypt or perhaps as a shard of the archaeological record that defines the population of our planet.
In their work, Soomin and Mikha-ez cite the work of an African American sociologist, W.E.B. De Bois, whose “Data Portraits” of the African diaspora in the USA were exhibited at the 1900 Paris Exposition. His work is described as a literal and figurative representation of “the colour line”. In a similar way the work of Soomin and Mikha-ez can be described as the cartographic analysis of our transience.
No. 225 Chloe Watfern, Priya Vaughan
21 January – 24 February Banners for a boiling world
Listening to Anie Nheu, Chloe Watfern and Priya Vaughan discussing this show one comment leapt out at me – “about the talking about it – sharing it between ourselves is more important than the result – in that sense I am embracing the ephemeral”. This project began with a picture book documenting the Great Barrier Reef. Bought as collage material but left on Chloe’s kitchen table within easy reach of 2-year-old Edie, her 5-year-old brother Lou their pens and their crayons. Chloe described -“sitting for a long time with my grief about climate change - the future our children will inherit, the loss we are already seeing (are) some of the things I have been thinking about, while making, or when looking at the images that I’ve made with my children”
The conversation about climate also surfaced in Chloe’s work as a collage artist. Facilitating workshops where art making was a vehicle for consciousness raising conversations and experiences – “and now I’m spending most of my professional time at the Black Dog Institute trying to create research and practices that address the social and psychological dimensions of the climate crisis using art.” And this is where Priya Vaughan joined the project. Together Chloe and Priya facilitated a collaborative collage, Tentacular where “Each tentacle of
this collective artwork reaches outwards, seeking connection and offering stories that speak to the ways we might care, in responsible and responsive ways, for ourselves, each other, and the wounded world.”
This then is art that is doing something about the climate catastrophe that is descending upon us. Not by offering didactic graphic monologues that upon reflection may alert us to an imminent danger
but through a tangible social interaction where new attitudes and understandings are fostered. These conversations and the images they generate may indeed be ephemeral, their consequence however will inevitably be enduring. Here is a collaborative work made by Chloe, her children and her friend Priya, and while their conversations may well be more important than their visual offering, you our audience can only be sure of it by pausing and considering their conversation.