Layered Land: Time Fragility Repair
My exhibition Layered Land: Time Fragility and Repair at M16 in Canberra is in its last week. The opening and artist talk was one big whirl of seeing old friends and talking about my art to interested and engaging persons and Gallery sitting M16 for the weekend. John and I bumped in on the Tuesday and I was really pleased with the hang. He went back to the coast, and I spent the rest of the week with family and friends. Valerie Kirk former head of Textiles at ANU opened my show and was very complimentary about my art. I made a sale of four pieces on the opening night and more across the weekend.
The opening paragraph of my Artist Statement reads “The landscape, sea, coast, and open spaces can be powerful, emotive places of exploration, reminiscence, and memories. Barbara Dawson’s ‘Layered Land’ series of drawings and textiles investigates the way a place is remembered. In the mind’s reinterpreting details are altered, omitted, and become imbued with one’s own emotional outlook.”
I was born in Canberra and lived most of my life there. I moved to the Jervis Bay area ten years ago and am surrounded by the National Park and the waters of the Bay. Although this is an idyllic place and I am moved by the interplay of the Littoral Zone (the area between the sea and the high tide) and the unfortunate erosion of this shoreline, I am still drawn the landscape lines of the Brindabella Mountain range that surround Canberra.
When I first started on this body of work, I presumed I was influenced by this Littoral Zone but as I drove back into Canberra after our enforced lockdown due to the pandemic, I saw the landscape lines of the mountains of Canberra and realised I was also influenced by my childhood memories. So, this is why my statement talks about reinterpreting details that you have remembered; in my case landscapes, as they are often layered with the emotions felt at the time or in the present.
Most of the textile pieces are created using fabric from recycled bed linen. These pieces of cloth were wrapped around my eco contact prints and the bundles were immersed and heated in a Eucalyptus leaf dye solution to create the contact print. on paper. These eco prints formed a large part of my previous bodies of artwork. I also taught this printing method using these cloths to many students over the last ten years. The cloths have been dyed and over dyed countless times and this has created a rich patina with the combination of tannin from the Eucalyptus leaves and homemade iron mordant. Some were used in Indigo dyeing. The cloths have that perfect intrinsic beauty that comes with age, oxidation, over-dyeing, and the layering of fragments of fabric.
More soon…
