INTERFACE

REVIEW

Arttextiles3

Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery, Bury St Edmunds
14 September – 30 October

Reviewed by: Wendy Anderson

‘Arttextiles3’ is the venue’s third major survey of British artists referencing textiles. This open exhibition attracted 450 submissions from which the selectors Susan Hiller, Sarat Maharaj, Jonathan Watkins and Sarah Quinton, arrived at just eighteen artists. As you would expect, they are connected by a common interest in material, but within those terms there is a wide diversity of process and concept.

We experience textiles every day; they are an essential part of culture. Our choice of clothes identifies the social group to which we belong. There may be religious and political reasons as well as fashion pressures that affect our clothing decisions. ‘Arttextiles3’ reflects these concerns.

The use of text is common throughout the exhibition: Tony Rickaby’s Cotton Factory – Work Force uses a constructed area of stitched text with collections of images and objects to create a small theatrical space. Bharti Parmar’s unique remake of the Lord’s Prayer, made with her own and found hair, is painstakingly stitched on to material.

Barley Massey’s floor piece, Roadworks in Progress, reuses bicycle inner tubes, yarn and machine stitching, to resemble the double yellow lines of road markings. Massey has brought the outside in, contrasting noisy urbanity to the tranquility of the museum space. Location and mapping is explored by Joe Scotland in his delicate needlework remakes of existing maps. Sometimes folded, minimal and highly detailed, these are orienteering comforters.

Farhad Ahrarnia’s video, Mr. Singer, shows a map put through a sewing machine, tracing the borders of Middle Eastern countries. The audio track is crucial: a banging drum parallels the sewing machine which in turn sounds like a machine gun, clearly linking the regions with war, imperialism and economic distribution. In contrast, but in the same vein, Tajender Sagoo’s Flag of Independence is a small hand-sized stitched flag, nailed to the wall; a powerful reminder of the individual, piecing together the fragments of personal identity.

Domesticity is examined by Gerard William’s Interior Worlds. A pair of binoculars on the gallery window ledge gives a clear invitation to peer at the empty house opposite. Close inspection reveals five windows dressed to look like family occupants. There is a clear link with Andrea Stokes’ Butter Net in which she has stenciled a net curtain motif onto the gallery windows.

Silvia Ziranek’s performance Dress Messages was central to the opening event. Direct, witty and uncompromising, Ziranek delivered a rhythmic dialogue as she glided between two shop dummies, dressing one with bags and speaking to the other. Ziranek’s humorous jibes at identity (“Am I well made? Will I match?”) question herself as a garment, while addressing the audience as if we were an interactive mirror. Susanne Norregard Nielsen continues the theme of dressing with Self-portrait in Supremacist Dress, a large photograph of the artist jumping in a picturesque landscape, wearing a Malevich-inspired peasant dress.

Photographic details of the gallery assistants’ clothing are taken by a digital, microscopic camera in Fran Cottell’s Perception. This collection of evidence records the exhibition daily and the ritual of dressing for work. Hanging in the gallery corner, as if forgotten, is a pair of dirty dungarees. On closer inspection I realise that this is no oversight: what looks randomly splashed and marked is the artwork of Susan Collis, 100% cotton. Each tiny blemish is lovingly embroidered; what looks fast and accidental is in fact slow and methodical. This play with time is another theme which permeates throughout the whole show.

I found myself more interested in the individual works than with what camp the artists came from, or whether they studied fine art or textiles. In general, the works are powerful and challenging in their own right to the degree that the show’s title is made redundant, and this is exactly how it should be.

Writer detail:
Wendy Anderson is an artist and is currently working on a book ‘Painting’ processes and techniques.

Venue detail:
Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery
The Market Cross, Cornhill, Bury St Edmunds IP33 1BT

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