Fresh Material: New Australian Textile Art by Dr Laini Burton

Textile-based arts have long occupied vexed territory, characterised as being between binaries such as high and low art, amateur or professional practice, and craft or hobby. As a genre, it is often seen to sit on the fault lines of fine art, fashion and dress. In this ‘and/or’ space, textile art affects a kind of rupture to its attendant binaries where it can eschew rigidly defined classifications through its tendency toward cross-pollination. And, although it holds a well-documented position at the sidelines of the art historical canon, textile art has the distinct advantage of crossing class divisions even while being implicated within its own histories of gendered and racialised labour. Its broad range of mediums, techniques and processes make textile art a genuinely democratic form of material language. The far-reaching historical and cultural entanglements of textile art stretch back thousands of years. The story of textile arts is, quite simply, the story of human civilisation. Therefore, it has been subject to assimilation and adaptation, economics and politics, power, and the heavy legacy of empire.

Textile’s ability to retain traces of the artist’s hand lends it an auratic quality, a concept championed by William Morris, the British textile designer, poet and artist who became the figurehead of the British Arts and Crafts Movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although Morris & Co. may be known for professionalising textile art, it had been deployed by the women’s suffrage movement for strategic political ends to galvanise support and draw attention to issues of inequality. Textile arts returned as a tour de force within the early 20th Century Bauhaus school of applied arts, architecture and design. The Bauhaus principles of collaboration, innovation, and bringing art into everyday life reflect textiles’ history which echoes these same production methods. Textile art has long been a form of socialisation and a way to disseminate cultural knowledge. Despite its progressive aims, the Bauhaus school’s weaving workshop was assigned to women students, repeating textile arts’ historical classification as gendered labour. Today, we celebrate those Bauhaus artists – women such as Anni Albers, Otti Berger, Margarete Köhler, Marli Ehrman, Gunta Stölzl and Sheila Hicks – whose works left an indelible mark on the school’s legacy. In more recent history, the political movement of Second Wave Feminism saw textile-based arts thrive, entering the era of contemporary art. In her revolutionary 1984 book The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, feminist art historian Rozsika Parker addressed the “historical hierarchical division of the arts into fine arts and craft as a major force in the marginalisation of women’s work”. At the time, Parker’s work not only underscored how embroidery coincided with constructions of femininity but also sought to “break down boundaries between different forms of creative expression”. Arguably, this struggle to receive recognition has remained for many textile-based artists.

However, it is important to note that this brief patchwork history of textile-based arts represents a decidedly Western record. Conceptions of textile art and all other contemporary art genres have been destabilised by bodies of thought such as postcolonialism and decolonisation. We have recently witnessed textile art become disentangled from EuroAmerican markets and taste, and embrace non-Western histories, legacies, and narratives.

Now, as it did in the 2000s, we see textile art buoyed by institutional attention. Its presence in national and international galleries has allowed textile artists to publicly tackle some of the most pressing global crises of our time. One might think of artists such as El Anatsui, whose metal textiles acknowledge the history and abuses of the African slave trade, or Nick Cave, whose sculptural sound suits are worn to obscure race, gender, and class to protect the wearer’s identity. Pioneering artist and activist Faith Ringgold’s quilts evoke the traditions and stories of African American life, while Doh Ho Suh’s monumental diaphanous architectural spaces question notions of home, identity, migration, and travel. Australia has its own cache of significant textile artists who respond to personal and collective issues: Wiradjuri woman Karla Dickins’ textiles and poems address complex and overlapping issues of racism, domestic life, motherhood and addiction; Sydney artist Gerwyn Davies shrouds himself in flamboyant, playful costumes, drawing attention to how we simultaneously conceal and construct our identities; Khadim Ali’s rich tapestries seduce the viewer, only to reveal the horrors of war; Waanyi man Gordon Hookey’s banners inspired by Aboriginal histories recall the long history of textile used for protest purposes; and, Pia Interlandi’s textile research has led her to create bio-degradable burial garments. This small sample, along with the artists showcased in Fresh Material: New Australian Textile Art, makes the impact of textile arts apparent in connecting us with contemporary life and politics.

Although textile art and artists acknowledge the contingencies within which they practice, subject to the social, cultural, and political exigencies of the time, the legitimisation of textile art through capricious trends has not diminished its growing significance as an art form. Its uninhibited approach to diverse mediums provides a model for inclusivity and exemplifies methods of cross-pollination that abound in contemporary art. Through observing the work made by the artists of Fresh Material: New Australian Textile Art, a viewer might identify three specific threads of inquiry. They are, gender and identity, memory and belonging, and space and place.

GENDER AND IDENTITY Examining its historical associations with gendered labour, many of the artists in Fresh Material: New Australian Textile Art continue the work that the 70s feminists began, revealing the ongoing gender and power inequities that permeate various aspects of their lives. Joseph McBrinn’s 2021 publication Queering the Subversive Stitch: Men and the Culture of Needlework offers a twenty-first-century addition to textile histories and directly responds to Parker’s pioneering text The Subversive Stitch. Where Parker outlines “both the negative and positive effects of [embroidery’s] position in relation to the social structuring of sex difference and art practice”, McBrinn broadens the gendered reading of needlework, embroidery, lacemaking, rag-rug making, cross-stitch and petit-point to establish the construction of masculinities and its relationship to textile-based arts. As with Parker, McBrinn seeks to expand not only the scholarship but the appreciation of textile-based arts and, in doing so, add to Parker’s legacy of uncovering the complex gendered histories of textile art. As Parker’s Foreword declares, embroidery – and here by extension, all textile-based arts – “provided a weapon of resistance to the constraints of femininity”. The fluidity and expansion of gender categories today means that textile arts can address the oppressive constraints of gender to which so many have been tethered.

MEMORY AND BELONGING Because of their tactility and closeness to the body, textiles can sustain and communicate memory, mourning, and memorialisation. Their connection to personal and collective histories often allow us to cross space and time. Marius Kwint, in Material Memories: Design and Evocation, claims there are three ways in which objects serve memory. That is, to: “furnish recollection; they constitute our picture of the past”; “stimulate remembering … bringing back experiences which otherwise would have remained dormant, repressed or forgotten”; and, to “form records: analogues to living memory, storing information beyond individual experience”. Given the emotional value invested in textiles and textile-based art, it is interesting to note that until relatively recently, historical research on textiles valorised objectivity over the more unruly yet undeniably related field of emotions. Several artists in Fresh Material: New Australian Textile Art demonstrate that textiles, with their visceral and psychological immediacy, possess a potency that can provide powerful, affective experiences enabling us to tap into our full emotional repertoire, be they joyous or painful. Consider, for example, wedding or burial attire, hand-stitched quilts or clothing that evokes love, joy, and loss, or our favourite pair of jeans. Textiles and textile-based art is a means of preserving and accessing notions of memory and belonging that are central to human experience.

SPACE AND PLACE The critique of gendered hierarchies in art catalysed by the feminist interventions of the 70s, while not resolved, are now joined by equally urgent matters such as the climate emergency, globalisation, and tenuous geopolitical borders. Textiles and textile art is imbued with histories of migration, colonisation, and globalisation. They are therefore accompanied by fraught origin stories that many artists recognise. Textile art has the capacity to make geographies tangible, materialised in various forms that foster critical dialogues on the ways we come into daily contact with textiles. Textiles carry layers of information that tell stories of space, place and belonging; they are deeply rooted in identity and the liminal concept of an increasingly transitory global populous. In recent years, the textile industry’s role in environmental degradation has drawn international attention. An ongoing dilemma is the significant waste generated by overproduction, toxic landfills, and damage caused by manufacturing processes and synthetic materials. Many textile artists mindfully navigate this terrain by transforming existing materials through reuse and recycling. As the viewer will surely feel, the weight of these concerns plays heavily on the minds of the artists in Fresh Material: New Australian Textile Art.

CONCLUSION In Fray: Art and Textile Politics, Julia Bryan-Wilson offers an incisive account of how textiles form part of our social fabric, demonstrating their power to communicate personal and political agency, which is embedded in the materials used to convey the artist’s message. Recent writing by scholars such as Bryan-Wilson, McBrinn, and Jenelle Porter’s Vitamin T: Threads and Textiles in Contemporary Art provide critical attention to the growing significance of textile-based arts. Yet, there is room for a more global, intersectional critique to define the politics of textiles for 21st-century artists and audiences. Such a tome could consider, for example, the recent global reckoning that followed the Black Lives Matter movement, the #MeToo movement and the ongoing decolonisation of cultural and other institutions. This would be no minor task, and therefore I leave it to a bolder scholar than I to dare tackle such a substantial topic. Textile art has, as Bryan-Wilson suggests, been described as either radical by eschewing the digital or the manufactured, as an alternative to commoditised mass production, or as conservative for its closeness to traditional craft roots. So how does contemporary textile art respond to this? The artists in Fresh Material: New Australian Textile Art offer fresh insights, proving that textile art can be either or all these things. They continue as they always have done – with enduring regard for materiality, respect for process, consideration of historical techniques, joy in decelerated time, and a hopeful eye on the future.