Textile design today is a vibrant boundary-blurring creative field. By its very nature, it cross-pollinates. Moving through disciplines – graphic, furniture and product design, fashion and the visual arts – it manifests as surface patterning, material experimentation and transfiguration, storytelling and conceptual ideas.
Despite the hardships of recent years, Australian textile-based practices are flourishing. Makers are finding renewed confidence in community-driven interest, co-creation, and inclusivity. Collaborations in the fashion industry are on the increase, forged by creatives such as Romance Was Born, Iordanes Spyridon Gogos, Grace Lillian Lee and initiatives such as First Nations Fashion + Design. The skyrocketing visibility within First Nations practices is partly due to the passionate vision of new enterprises and reinforced by the meaningful and covetable textile designs being produced by artists in Top End and remote art centres and collectives. In line with these developments, and urgent sustainability concerns, the artisanal ethos is gaining agency.
New Exuberance celebrates the work of more than 30 textile creatives and includes 10 commissioned furniture pieces produced by designers associated with JamFactory to acknowledge the rich diversity of textile-based practices in contemporary art, design and fashion in this country now.
Studio detail of Nixi Killick. Photo courtesy of Emily Rose Hyde Page.
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