selveage

For about 5 years I have been creating dress-art pieces. This evolved from dress imagery emerging in my paint-ings (along with othersymbolic images such as birds, patterned floors and walls, horses) during the 25 years prior to this. Most of the textile-based dress-art pieces I have been making in recent years are knitted and stitched with fine metallic threads and wires. I also digitally manipulate photographs of these as presented here. These dress-art pieces Some of my work explores the abstract. come to symbolise an expression across recent years of settling into my adopted home of Australia – specifically the western region of Victoria. Adapting to this new place for me, has been a process of journeying back and forth to New Zealand, exploring stories and images of ancestry there, in Tasmania and Ireland, to develop a strong awareness of self, interconnected with my ancestral places. As Maori and Australian indigenous wisdom informs us, we are not entirely inseparable from our intricate interconnections with ancestry and place; as I come to know and appreciate Indigenous relationships with the environment and country, I am convinced that connecting with my own ancestors and place/identity (Malpas, 2018) through my art process is significant.
I have come to learn from this practice-led research that the phenomenon of dress-art across a thirty-year practice as an artist, depicts my aesthetic - inspiring me at times to invite others to knit their own pieces to see what aesthetic choices they make. My own dress art pieces and theirs, represent selves, the space, contours and perimeters of the female body but symbolic and a continuum of the techniques and repetitive processes my/our own
ancestral women engaged in as they too knitted, stitched and mended throughout their lives. Many of us share stories of how these making processes were passed down, we compare techniques of knitting and crocheting
which is a continuum in my family of from grandmothers. This dress-art series is dress scholarship – a scholarly field that explores the personal, religious, social and cultural reasons for choosing, making and wearing partic-
ular clothes (I have articulated this in one of my book chapters From the Parlour to the Forum: How Dress Art unsettles place and space, 2019).
This exhibition title ‘Selve-age’ captures a concept of ‘selves’ across time identifying with the traditional work of women that stitch, lace, knit, weave and crochet. This title references selvedge (the edge of fabric that is stopped from fraying). The word salvage is also referenced here; I seek out hand made op-shop items which have been discarded and sold for a fraction of their true value. I honour the work of these fine makers of the past and in doing so pay homage to their time and rich creativity by collaborating with them for some of the artefacts I re-purpose.