Soft Actions (1)
2 December 2022 at 11:00:00 pm
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Session Convenors
Dr Boni Cairncross, University of Wollongong
Session Speakers
Emeritus Professor Diana Wood Conroy, University of Wollongong
Francisco Guevara
Ju Bavyka
Connie Anthes
Historically, craft as often been positioned as ‘other’ to art. In Modernist thought, craft practices, such as textiles, were framed as too conservative, uncritical and embedded in daily life to be the ‘stuff’ of visual arts. In recent years, there has been a revaluing of craft practices. The processes and materials associated with craft have been employed by artists and designers as critical sites for discussion, advocacy, activism and protest. These actions are wide-ranging: from collective making spaces, to projects that seek to open conversations and debates, to artworks that employ craft to interrogate intersecting or overlooked histories, to craft-as-protest. In these creative strategies, the familiarity, the ‘softness’, and embodied knowledges of the craft processes are powerful devices that are drawn on and utilised by creative practitioners.
Soft Architectures: Texts from the edge
Emeritus Professor Diana Wood Conroy, University of Wollongong
‘Soft actions’ blossomed in woven artworks in Australia in the 1970s when large scale tapestries and textile installations were commissioned for the burgeoning new public city scape of Sydney. The Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz’s immense woven pieces filled the Art Gallery of NSW in 1976, before weaving was taught in any art school or university. The unlikely resurgence in weaving in NSW was helped by the knowledge of highly trained women who were emigrants from post-war Europe, such as Jutta Feddersen, Marcella Hempel, Erica Semler and Solvig Baas Becking, all of whom had a wide influence as teachers and artists. Counter to the ‘high’ art of public tapestries in great buildings was the second wave feminist investigation into the domestic position of textiles as redolent of decoration, anonymity and the abject (female) body. Individual artist weavers in the 1990s developed these strands in the exhibition Texts from the edge: Tapestry and Identity in Australia (Jam Factory, Adelaide and University of Wollongong, 1994), a case study here. This paper explores woven tapestry through an artist’s experience moving between architectural spaces and private spheres. Understanding a tumultuous past has resonances for the present, when the sign of weaving may be potent again
Disrupting Indigo: Performing Ethical Questions Arising from Embodiment and Colour
Francisco Guevara
From the cloak of Emperor Moctezuma in 16th-century Mesoamerica, to the very identifiable police uniforms around the globe, indigo and power have a long and intertwined history of performing together. Indigo blue indeed has a fascinating history and the power to make us embody and perform in specific ways. Throughout the four centuries of the slave trade, color —especially indigo— achieved more conquests than European-instigated violence. It became a currency and a global commodity that colored multiple empires and even found its way into our everyday life as a seemingly simple fashion statement through denim.
In this essay, I will explore the use of indigo in my painting/textile practice. I use indigo as method, but also as visual translation/distortion to address ethical questions arising from process. Change is color. Embodiment is performance, a performance with the power to continuously deceive. As color occupies bodies, it also makes them move. Therefore, what happens when an artist invokes the power of indigo in their/my work? Is it a settled matter with a problematic history? Is emancipation from the legacy of color possible at all?
The role of craft as a relational tool
Ju Bavyka & Connie Anthes
In 2019, Ju Bavyka and Connie Anthes developed Soft Infrastructure, which was presented in 3 different site-specific configurations at Firstdraft (Sydney), Kings ARI (Melbourne) and Tributary Projects (Canberra). The exhibition tested a series of prototypes to “institute softness” for infrastructures and institutional settings. Practically, this took many forms: from requesting snacks from strangers, building wearable walls, tending a constructed weed garden as a site for difficult conversations, and taking our audiences away for a one night retreat where we cooked, read and talked together. The “soft” craft work that was produced was not only material, but also relational, connecting active and responsive hand-making with concepts of care, holding space and hospitality. For Soft Actions conference, Ju and Connie will present a paper/experimental text unpacking Soft Infrastructure as a basis for reconsidering the role of craft as a relational tool.
Biographies
Dr Boni Cairncross, University of Wollongong
Boni Cairncross is a visual artist and academic currently based on Dharawal Country / Kiama, NSW. Her research and art practice is an exploration of time: slow stitching, durational performance, and time-based processes that reveal the trace of the artist’s body. Underpinning this is an interest in the multisensory frameworks that shape the social and political understandings of materials and the ways in which we encounter them. She has presented exhibitions and performances widely throughout Australia. In 2019, she was artist-in residence at the Australian Archaeological Institute of Athens. She is currently a lecturer in Visual Arts at the University of Wollongong, Australia.
Emeritus Professor Diana Wood Conroy, University of Wollongong
Diana Wood Conroy’s research interests combine archaeology and contemporary visual cultures in publications such as Tiwi textiles: design, making, process, with Bede Tungutalum (Sydney University Press 2022) The Handbook of Textile Culture (Bloomsbury, London 2018) and in Weaving Culture in Europe, (Athens, Greece, 2017). From 1973 – 1988 she designed and wove tapestry commissions for architects in Sydney. As artist-in-residence, and archaeologist of Roman fresco at the Paphos Theatre Excavation in Cyprus since 1996, her work explores classical themes and personal worlds in tapestry and drawing, and is held in national and international collections. She is Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at the Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Wollongong, Australia.
Francisco Guevara
Francisco Guevara is a visual artist, independent scholar, and founder of Arquetopia Foundation and International Artist Residencies based in Mexico, Peru and Italy. His experience spans more than 20 years of international artistic projects, curating and teaching, as well as multiple collective and solo exhibitions. He specializes in Levinasian ethics applied to the design of cross-cultural artistic projects, and the analysis of historiography and performativity in contemporary art practices. As a visual artist, Guevara investigates the historical construction of the differentiation processes, embodiment, and the concept of distortion through a wide range of artistic/historical mediums, including painting, installation, and metalsmith.
Ju Bavyka
Ju Bavyka is a Kazakhstan-born artist, arts worker and (migrant) writer living on unceded Gadigal and Wangal land. They are interested in the intersection of artistic and everyday research and practices of hospitality and generosity, as well as labour conditions and survival tips. Their writing has been published in Cp 20 (Yellow George/Schmick Projects, 2021), un Magazine 15.2 (2021) and Runway Journal (2022), a result of their participation in the Firstdraft Writers Program in 2021. They recently self-published the poetry collection the moment you realise what you don’t have to be (2022). They are part of Frontyard Projects and also consider themself a door.
Connie Anthes
Connie Anthes is an artist working on stolen Gadigal and Bidjigal land who makes objects, books, performances, site-specific interventions and installations that consider material politics and process as an essential ingredient in a broader entanglement with art and life. She is one half of the collaborative duo Make or Break and a co-founder of Frontyard Projects (Marrickville) and Palms Studio and Workshop for women and non-binary artists (Rockdale), where she also shares labour, time and tea with Ju Bavyka.