It’s a gutsy move these days to frame a major visual art exhibition around the idea of being ‘radical’.
For a start, the disruptive times in which we are living mean there is no shortage of ‘radical’ actions playing out around us – both in the art world and in society at large.
What’s more, a clear definition of the term ‘radical’ – especially in the art contexts – is one that is wide open for debate.
For example, is it radical to be among the first artists to use certain materials (like textiles) or express ideas in ways that no other artists have tried before? The answer to that is almost certainly ‘yes.’
But is it also radical to use your art to stare down systems of oppression and turn your audiences’ eyes to where injustices are occurring? Or make art as a form of activism? These answers – especially in the present day context – are far from clear.
These ambiguities have not stopped the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA)’s Radical Textiles curatorial team – AGSA’s Curator of Contemporary Art, Leigh Robb and Curator of Decorative Art and Design, Rebecca Evans – in their selection of over 150 textile-based works, which they have brought together to pose the question ‘what is radical about textiles?’.
Continuing legacies through textiles
The curators have designed the show around the main themes of ‘revival’, ‘resistance’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘remembrance’ and ‘revelry’ and, while audiences are not explicitly informed of these themes as they experience the show – as the curators’ note, these key ideas are ‘threaded throughout’ the exhibition – they offer important insights into Radical Textiles’ conceptual breadth and ambition.
Starting with the theme of ‘revival’, there are a number of finely-crafted small-scale works dotted throughout the show that speak to the idea of how certain contemporary artists are committed to keeping legacy textile traditions and techniques alive in the modern day.
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A very interesting work in this regard is an intricate needle lace piece by Adelaide-based artist Maggie Hensel-Brown. Titled January 24th (2024) it uses centuries-old lace techniques to portray ‘an ordinary day in the life’ of someone we are all likely to know.
Hensel-Brown’s miniature work melds the old and new, portraying a familiar 21st century domestic setting in a beautifully-crafted piece that has many hallmarks of the quintessential family heirloom lace doily, but unlike those heirlooms, its imagery is completely relatable and meaningful to many people’s everyday lives today.
Also stunning in form and detail are a series of hand-crocheted miniature sculptural forms by Adelaide artist Catherine Buddle. The artist’s cocoon vessel, chrysalis vessels and anemones with ni vessels (2019) pieces are very tiny works displayed within a glass cabinet, yet they command attention due to their immaculate construction and glowing form.
But when it comes to the show’s next theme of ‘resistance’, there is hardly a miniature, softly-spoken work in sight. These pieces, which hinge on ideas of politics and human rights – including workers’ rights, women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ rights and Indigenous rights – are among the loudest in the room.
Perhaps the most prominent works are a series of painted and stitched political banners from various Australian workers/unions’ campaigns throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Installed in the exhibition’s entrance atrium space, these banners – which are on loan from the State Library of South Australia, the Australian Workers’ Union and the Parliament House Art Collection among others – speak to the significance of union movements and industrial action to the nation’s history.
Whether these pieces are understood as artworks or not, the message is clear. Textiles have a long history of carrying political meaning, and these works – which include impressive contributions by artists and designers – signal how much their protest actions have achieved in the name of social justice and workers’ rights in this country since colonisation.
Alongside that idea of protest, the show also reveals the power of textiles to evoke memories, and keep the memories of those we have lost close in our minds.
On this theme of memorialising and remembrance, the show features a wide array of works with direct connection to these ideas, but among its most prominent is a large quilted work made by members of local South Australia community in the 1990s as part of the Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt project launched by Ita Buttrose at the Sydney Opera House on World AIDS Day, 1 December 1988.
At that event, four quilts were displayed, remembering family, friends and lovers lost to AIDS, and the attention the project cast across the nation inspired many more Australian families and social networks to create their own remembrance quilts as a way to remember their own loved ones recently lost to AIDS. Over the next decade, over 120 quilts, remembering over 2700 individuals, were created – and one of those has a strong presence in the show.
This piece is installed adjacent to another large-scale community-based art project entitled NELL ANNE QUILT – conceived and developed over the past five years by Australian artist, Nell. This floor-to-ceiling quilt has been made by over 440 contributors in response to a call-out the artist did after realising (in 2016) that only 16% of all Wikipedia biographies were about women, and inviting anyone in the community to submit their own handmade quilted patch representing a woman who has given their lives meaning in some way.
The artist chose New Zealand artist Anne McCahon (Hamblett) as her muse for this work, and her first name, alongside Nell’s, is a central feature of this piece. As the wife of celebrated artist New Zealand modernist Colin McCahon, Anne McCahon has not received anywhere near the same level of recognition as her husband, despite being an accomplished artist in her own right.
Nell noticed this and, thus, just like the AIDS Memorial Quilt Project, her epic textile piece is testament to the power of collective action to make what is generally unseen, ignored or sidelined into a highly visible presence in the public eye.
Artists exploring materiality
As viewers move further into the exhibition, the works become less about politics and social connectedness, and more about materiality and artists’ experimentation with textiles as a medium to push their concepts to new heights.
Standout works in this regard include Australian artist Tarryn Gill’s series of soft sculptures or Guardians (2014-2016), which are strangely entrancing deities, elegantly installed in a semi-circular arrangement in one of the main gallery spaces.
Also mesmerising is Paul Yore’s psychedelic montage Let us not die from habit (2018), which at first glance appears as an overwhelming mash-up of the familiar and the bizarre, but upon slower contemplation unlocks layers of meaning around what our present day society chooses to celebrate, manipulate, denigrate and/or discard. It’s clear evidence of the sharp and potent potential of this supposedly soft medium.
There are also some exquisite large-scale woven wool ‘canvases’ by 20th century modernist artist Sonia Delaunay in her signature style (widely known as Orphism), and equally stunning woven wall-hangings by well-known mid-century US sculptor Alexander Calder. These works showcase the potency and vibrancy of textile art in a very different way to Yore’s splashy, modern day collaged wonderland, but they are no less visually arresting and wondrous to take in.
Interestingly, this comparison – between a contemporary artist like Paul Yore and 20th century modernist icons like Delaunay and Calder – is a fitting way to summarise this show in terms of its diversity and its open-ended interpretation and exploration of what we think of as ‘radical textiles’.
It must be said that, by the end of the exhibition, viewers may be left wondering what in fact makes some of its showcased work so ‘radical’. Yet there is at least one perceptible current running throughout, and that is around the politics of this this supposedly ‘soft’ art medium, which is often (very unfairly) positioned as secondary to mediums like painting and sculpture, but which has allowed so many incredible artists of the past and present to create work that will continue to leave a powerful mark.
Radical Textiles will be at the Art Gallery of South Australia until 30 March 2025; ticketed.
