2 to 27 August 2022
OFFICIAL OPENING: Friday 5 August, 5.30–7.30pm
Colleen Adams
Susan Brophy
Terri Friesen
Mary-Jane Griggs
Juanita McLauchlan
Kim Nelson-Thomson
Beth Peters
Tara Walsh
Marking Time explores the fascination and a general admiration for detail in the hand made.
Mary-Jane Griggs has invited artists whose works give a sense of a slow meditative approach to making art, concentrating on repetition and time spent on the task at hand. Artworks by eight women range from wrapped objects, sewing, embroidery, stitching, printmaking and drawing.
The sense of a slow and thoughtful hand use of materials, the intense focus and process encapsulates the time dedicated to work quietly on a solo creative task. The works have conceptual rationales that reflect the diverse individuals but are linked in their use of repetition and detail in their mark-making or motif or stitching, wrapping, carving, and use of colour.
The work is thoughtful and reminiscent of age old hand crafts. Historically and culturally the handmade is placed in the realm of women and the domestic. Quietly stitching, darning, embroidering, knitting into the evening is the reward after a day’s work.
Sayings such as ‘empty hands make the devil’s work’ and ‘the devil is in the detail’ imply almost a moral expectation that one needed to always do something that was constructive. That idleness was an invitation to danger. As a creative item, craft was dismissed as feminine and domestic – not Art.
Griggs suggests that the works in Marking Time are inventive and subversive in their insistent, quiet fascination with incremental making in contrast to the accepted canon of gusty men and wild women making risky art and leading reckless lives that runs through the published history of modern and recent Art.
Guest Speaker at the opening is artist Dr Julie Montgarrett
Participants in Marking Time include Colleen Adams, Susan Brophy, Terri Friesen, Mary-Jane Griggs, Juanita McLauchlan, Kim Nelson-Thomson, Beth Peters and Tara Welsh
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