Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Reviewed by: Victoria Mitchell
'Art Textiles 2' is a sequel to 'Art Textiles 1', initiated by Barbara Taylor at Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery in 1996. One of the exhibitors in 1996, Polly Binns, was this time one of four selectors, with Yinka Shonibare, Sarat Maharaj and Gill Hedley. Out of 440 artists who submitted slides, twenty-three were finally selected for exhibition. In addition, as 'Textiles on Site', four artists were commissioned to make site-specific works for locations in the town. This exhibition does not work in an 'instant fix' kind of way; it needs time and space. This may be because many of the works reflect a painstaking attention to materials and processes, also that they exhibit a considerable range and richness of meaning. With twenty-one of the artists represented in one elegant, beautifully-lit period room, it is necessary to stand back, figuratively speaking, from the intensity. In my mind's eye I see these works at their best in a more spacious, less polished environment, where their multiple messages might be revealed more dispassionately.
Nevertheless, it is a good show. As well as the works displayed in the art gallery there are four shops in the town displaying work. Of these, Jane Baker's Glass Dress in the window of Toni + Guy is visually stunning, compelling thoughts of the shattered identities which can lie veiled beneath elegant appearances.
Nearly a third of the artists have created garment or body forms. Lesley Mitchison projects onto infant dresses a story of love which suffocates in exquisite delicacy, reflecting the intimacy and intricacy of a making which is also an unmaking. Shelley Goldsmith's use of heat-transfer photographs of a flood disaster, printed onto reclaimed dresses from a children's home, create a similar conjunction – in this case through a juxtaposition of innocence in the face of tragedy. Leo Smith's knitted Shadow (3pm) is also disconcerting. It is not so much a garment as a body form, a muffled, ghostly shadow, materialised yet remote and uncanny. The grey wool seems to evoke the elusive connotations of shadow more poetically than paint could have done.
As Pamela Johnson argues in the catalogue, thinking and process here go hand in hand. Rather than the de-materialising which heralds the conceptual, a space is opened through which body and mind can enter a dialogue. In Empirical Cracks in the Pavement (1645-1883), Marilyn Rathbone has woven an elegiac 'pavement slab' resembling human hair over which is laid thread formations which read as 'cracks', cracks both of the 'pavement' and of the British historical figureheads who are named on the box in which the pavement is laid. This doubling of text and textile is also hinted at in work by Caroline Bartlett. More provocative narratives are explored in Nicola Morriss' Hemmed In in which fragile silk houses demonstrate hand stitching as a form of signature and the house as vulnerable and defenceless. In her Housecage the house is literally caged in but is able to 'sing' of freedom as its cheerful silken walls fill with air movements from the electric fan below.
The show finds coherence not only through textile manipulation of stitch and fibre but also through representation, whereby connotations of textile experience are (re)figured through other technologies and materials. It reflects a discipline, textile art, which has broken bounds, becoming not so much undisciplined as inter-disciplinary, not so much exploding as leaking in many directions. There is an invasion towards textiles from other visual practices and an increasingly rigorous critical-cultural questioning of intentions. Sally Morfill's animated computer graphics, endlessly repeating, of sewing and unpicking, bring the digital process of both sewing and computers into focus, an analogy which could be further developed. Similarly, Clio Padovani's lightboxes with their focused glimpses onto images of cloth suggest that a poetics of the body and of landscape are to be found in abundance through scrutiny of overlooked textile details. In all, there is a sense of the seemingly unending potential of textiles as an agency of visual exploration and knowledge.
Writer detail:
VICTORIA MITCHELL
, norwich school of art and design.
Venue detail:
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