Lorri Evans

The Tea Set

How much do we know about the clothing we wear today? In Australia 500,000 tonnes of textiles are dumped in landfill every year with little regard for who has made it, how long it has taken them, or if they have been properly paid for this effort. A large amount of these items are made from polyester, which can take up to 200 years to biodegrade. The enormous weight of our fashion industry is hard to ignore.

With this in mind, Lorri was horrified to note that even with her experience in textiles most of her own clothing had been made by someone else. She has therefore chosen working in textiles to shine a light on this wastage. Linen is the inspiration here, with its status as the most ancient of know fabrics. It also has wonderful breathing properties and a natural durability. Lorri’s work is influenced by the oldest known garment – a simple shirt, found in an Egyptian tomb that had been carefully adorned with the frayed edges of the linen fabric.

Her work is not only steeped in tradition but also tea, a nonchemical fabric dye. Using some Shibori techniques this created a base to build on with embroidery and additional frayed edging.

As the Dooms Day clock nears ever closer to midnight, Lorri encourages everyone to invest some time in their own clothing, to appreciate it for its true cost to humanity and our environment.

Ro Cook

Too Good to Use

After developing early life survival strategies for the isolation and mediocrity of suburban life, Cook realized a lot of her formative knowledge came from domestic items. The tea towel led the charge in her understanding of the world – from geography, biology, racist attitudes, poetry, politics and an appreciation of foods and local cultures throughout Australia. Later in life she returned to the tea towel as a medium for her artwork.

“Art you could use” she exclaimed! However, she was continually met with the refrain “Too good to use”

In this suite of work Cook takes a ‘tongue in cheek’ look at her Australiana tea towel collection and revisits her 2007 work “States of the Art” to create her own unique and ever so slightly irreverent works.

Tea towels that are indeed “Too good to Use”

Meryl Blundell

Introversion

A seemingly easy place to start for this series was the dot. What grew from that dot was hours of time creating the circle and contemplating why and what the circle represented to Meryl. The process became like a sequence of meditations. Circle of friends, being still, being with oneself, whole, (w)hole, movement, pendulum, links and connections, restlessness, finding focus, being calm and recharging were just some of the ideas that were being considered and challenged while her hands were focused on the physical aspect of the circle and its connections.

Constantly coming back to the question ‘why the dot, why the circle? It wasn’t easy to draw or make... Then underlying the whole process the awareness was realised. Physically, emotionally & mentally the most re occurring theme was ‘where is centre?’ Ironically perhaps? ‘What started with a dot continues with the search for centre.’ Introversion – to sit with oneself and recharge.

Romana Toson

Exploring natural dye techniques on paper and fabric inspired Romana to use these materials in her work. It has lead to interesting areas of development for her jewellery practice and encouraged her to experiment with making larger pieces, like wall works and small sculpture. To work with paper allows Romana to introduce a lightness and translucence to the pieces she makes as well as another way to explore pattern, paint, layers, texture and shape.

In exploring this medium, she has learned that paper itself is light and seemingly fragile but can also be very resilient and strong. To play with seemingly disparate, opposing elements and get them to work together underpins this series of work.

Gill Brooks

Fertile Ground

Gill’s ‘Handmade Life’ consists primarily of one of a kind and small production runs for galleries and artisan markets, so this exhibition is a brilliant opportunity to step ‘outside the box’ and dabble in all things not ‘commercially viable’’.

In this body of work Gill is combining her love of textiles in all its mediums with the extraordinary ability of wool fibres to integrate through other textiles and fibres and fuse together into a brilliant hybrid of colour, pattern and texture.

Gill has taken inspiration from a bevy of talented artisans, including those who quilt and crochet. She has drawn on these artisan’s brilliance with colour and pattern and replicates their aesthetic into her work.

She also returns time and again to the meditative quality of knitting and has been striving to incorporate this soulful craft into her felting practice, which not only gives her an excuse to buy more yarn but helps her create unique textured surfaces on her felt and has opened another world of surface design and texture possibilities for many years to come.

Kim Davies

Everything reminds me of You

The poetics of the human heart in the botanical form.

This work follows a long tradition of assigning special meaning to flowers and herbs. During the Victoria Era flowers quickly increased in popularity as a way to send subtle messages to others.

Rather than draw on a shared language, I have created a personal vocabulary of botanical ‘forms’, imagined or fragmented, assigning my own arbitrary emotions and life experiences to each. You may choose to assign your own experiences to the forms as you see them.