It's a Stitch Up

Alice Alva / Desiree Ratima / Jay Hutchinson / Kirsty Horrell / May Trubuhovich / Paul Yore / Rachel Kiddie McClure / Tiffany Singh / Wesley John Fourie

  • 4 Mar - 8 Apr, 2022
  • Ramp Gallery, R Block, WINTEC, Collingwood Street, Hamilton
It’s embroidery.  But not as your Nana knows it.  This exhibition explores the works of contemporary artists’ whose favourite flavour is needle and thread.

Historically needlework has always been used to explore identity, social and personal narrative as well as having an enduring relationship with politics, power and resistance.  This exhibition aims to acknowledge stitched traditions and continue the threads while consciously shifting the stitches in our own directions.  The artists are using embroidery to tell their own stitched stories, continually revising how they use the medium and how they can push it further.  Stitching is an act of thinking, processing and creating.  It helps us understand our past as well as what’s happening in the present and what we can hope for in the future.

The artists’ in this exhibition use needlework in varied ways, including personal narrative; exploration of identity, nature, spirituality and sex; interests in pattern making, ornamentation, architecture and craft-based processes; consideration of urban life, graffiti art and tagging; the borderline between art and pollution and high and low art; and contemplations of the political nature of craft and the role of the craftsperson.

With a wide variety of needlework processes and content, this exhibition aims to be an embroidered extravaganza, pushing the audience’s outlook of what needle and thread can do. 

 

Download Catalogue

 

Photography by Geoff Ridder