From 28 September to 1 December 2019, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Tamworth Regional Gallery are presenting Exploded textiles, an exhibition of leading international and Australian artists drawn from the collections of both galleries.
Staged at Tamworth Regional Gallery, the exhibition celebrates the regional NSW gallery's famous focus on textiles (as home of the Tamworth Textile Triennial) and coincides with its 100th anniversary in 2019.
Textiles are a compelling medium in contemporary art. Not only the realm of textile artists, they are the subject of enquiry for many artists with a more conceptual approach to practice.
None of the works here is an object of ‘textile art’ in the usual understanding of the term. They are textiles both by nature and by default; the result of their content as much as their form. Any notion of them as ‘purely’ textiles is exploded.
These textile-based works operate as potent conceptual signifiers. Some of the artists use textiles to declare, confess and seek dialogue. Others make connections between nature, culture, history and identity. For some, the impacts and legacies of colonialism are the subject of investigation. And finally, some mine the techniques of textile-making, but use surprising materials, formations, or activations while doing so.
Together, all the works in Exploded textiles reveal the capacity of artists to explore not only the material and formal properties of textiles, but also their socially, culturally loaded ones, their endlessly fascinating conceptual capacity. They show textiles to be the critical threads woven to form our social fabric.
Images of some works are not available online
