Performing objects

Matter and time, things that matter, time as a material, matter being transformed, worked on/deconstructed, meditated over and the processes of making are explored and engaged with variously by more than twenty-seven artists in the exhibition a matter of time curated by Suzie Attiwill.

When I saw the exhibition, the works were installed in one large room in the Tamworth Regional Gallery with two dividers punctuating the space. In sections of the gallery, groups of works engaged in dialogues with each other, works in different parts of the room reframed and reprised related themes and some artists used similar construction techniques to create markedly different objects. This made for a complex and multilayered exhibition where each work could be engaged with on its own terms and dialogue with the others.

One of the themes running through the exhibition that struck me is the notion of performance. Many of the objects alluded to use, to relationships with bodies, to process and ritual. The objects perform themselves, require us to move around them, or along them, to imagine touching them. They evoke the performances of their makers, the repetitive motions of stitching, picking apart, printing, weaving.

Georgina Creswell's Quilt for Sarah 1998 to 2004 is a quilt that doubles as a kind of diary, where stitches mark time, mass like schools of tiny fish and hold layers of fabrics of different levels of opacity in formation. When I look at it hanging on the wall I imagine it over the knees of the artist as they stitch, I think about counting and of all those unfinished things, objects, sewing projects and housework - the things that wait for us to complete them. Like other works in this exhibition this Quilt for Sarah simultaneously expresses and withholds, it is associated with a tragic event in the Creswell's life and remains secretive, containing within its layers a personal significance to her.

In Linda Lou Murphy's work drawing threads 2004, a series of objects Murphy used in a live performance at the opening of the exhibition were installed along a wall. They were like clothes yet also like nineteenth century scientific objects, frilled ruffs, overlong sleeves, bags that become viewing devices. I was unable to witness Murphy's performance so I encountered the objects installed with just two small Polaroids from the event pinned on the wall, leaving just a hint at what had occurred. The delicate pleated, patterned and ultimately fragile objects were made from ordinary sewing materials, interfacing, pins, brown paper. Like Creswell's work this piece referred to a past partly inaccessible to this viewer - I was left to imagine Murphy's process wondering how she moved, what was her presence like, did she engage directly with the audience, how did she perform with the objects?

Christian Bumbarra Thompson's Angry Young Blak Man 2004 is placed on a floor plinth so the viewer looks down on this strange quilted cape. Above the object are two photographs showing Thompson wearing the cape viewed from the front and back. The cape is made of a quilted fabric which contains the text ANGRY YOUNG BLAK MAN appliquéd on to the surface. It is a fascinating tragi-comic object. It reminds me of a moment from my childhood swinging on the washing line and pretending to be a super hero. Thompson appears in the photograph serious, gazing directly out of the frame, and I think of those weird nineteenth century photographs colonial anthropologists took showing Aboriginal people as scientific subjects. The cape appears strange and subversive, a symbolic object that draws attention to the complex nature of identity.

Sharon People's Tracings 2001 engages with colonial themes and the possibilities of narrative in a series of contrasting embroidered images. One side of her concertina book incorporates images of the hand sewing process showing the different stitches like instructional diagrams. Walk around the other side and panels containing the image of a vest and trousers (a convict uniform?) drift upwards on a red background, alternating with neutral cotton coloured panels containing images of shells. This work is like an intimate piece or theatre, an evasive narrative, starts me thinking, generates a whole series of images in my mind. It is like a series clues for the viewer to take away, clues that refer to history, to textile traditions and the traditions of collecting and re-telling stories. It makes me think of stitching and storytelling as part of the human inhabiting process, these are the means by which we inhabit certain places, tell ourselves into them and create histories.

Bula'bula arts Aboriginal Corporation's installation Continuum 2003 of Dhimbuka baskets and Balgurr dancing skirt are a collection of fascinating objects which also evoke performance and use. This collection of the dancing skirt and the series of baskets represent a non-western engagement with time and place. The title Continuum refers to the always present and always existing Dreaming. In the catalogue this concept is described in the following way:

...Yolngu thought centres on place and the location of events, It is thus place, and not time, that is the locus of the Dreaming. Creation is not the Dreamtime - it has no time. The Dreaming is omnipresent, all pervasive and is continually embodied through ritual and ceremony. There is no pre-history, only a continuum."

The objects included in this installation will change during the course of the exhibition, the ochres applied to the surface of the objects will disperse as they are handled and moved from place to place. They allude to rituals, to performances of daily life, of collecting, carrying, dancing, weaving, decorating. They are reminders of the interconnectedness of community life, things are made, used, decay. The dancing belt is described in the catalogue as referring to the rhythm of life and the markings on the baskets reflect the ebb and flows of tides.

Sue Pedley has harnessed pattern and movement to create Sound of Manh Tre 2004 a cyanotype print on paper made by exposing a light sensitive medium to the shifting rays of light coming through bamboo blinds in Vietnam. Her piece also refers to the continually shifting elements in our environment. It is the act of the sunlight falling on hanging blinds, and the breezes that shift the blinds which affect where the photosensitive medium will be exposed creating patterns on paper. The cyanotype image is created directly through the interplay of light and air, and even as a print on paper it retains some of this shifting quality.

From the material to the immaterial Andrew Nicholls creates a virtual textile with Untitled (Time after time), after a detail from Mac Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonte (1934), 2004 to 2006. An appropriated appropriation it hovers ghostlike on the wall fuzzing slightly out of focus towards one end. I wait to see if it moves, I have to lean back a bit because it is higher on the wall than the other works, I wait to see if it disappears.

For a matter of time Curator Suzie Attiwill has drawn together works from a diverse range of practitioners, the exhibition includes traditional and contemporary construction methods and materials, artists who do not come from a textile background and artists who are recognised for their textile based practices. The works mentioned above are only a small selection from a composition where the overall exhibition is a successful sum of a diverse range of engaging and complex parts.

Kate Murphy March 2005