ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Pattern Recognition, curated by Jodie Cunningham and Janice Falsone, celebrates female and non-binary artists from the Kamberri/Canberra region who use abstraction and design principles to explore colour perception and spatial relationships, highlighting a variety of approaches to colour, geometry and form. The exhibition also reveals the regenerative influence of re-imagined craft disciplines on contemporary art practice. While the exhibiting artists explore similar visual terrain embracing non-objective abstraction, repetition or pattern in their work their purposes range from the political (post-colonial and feminist critique, climate activism) to a more formalist concern with pictorial space and sensory engagement with materials.
Hannah Quinlivan’s Subaqueous (2024) is the first work encountered by visitors: a large, intricate veil-like structure suspended from the ceiling. This expanded drawing, made from hanging yarn, wire and moulded plastic, creates a dynamic and harmonious form through hypnotic repetition. A meditation on the term “structure of feeling” (coined by literary critic and theorist Raymond Williams), Subaqueous explores the idea that each generation’s emergent patterns of thought reflect shared emotions and ideologies shaped by their temporal and geographical circumstances. Quinlivan seeks, in particular, to amplify the affective atmosphere of our response to social and environmental concerns. The piece uses reconfigured and transformed elements from previous works, embracing a cycle of renewal that Quinlivan likens to a kind of “art surgery.” For the exhibition’s opening event, Naarm/Melbourne-based mezzo-soprano Shikara Ringdahl, a long-time collaborator, engaged with Quinlivan’s piece both physically and vocally.
In contrast to the monochromatic rhythm of Subaqueous, the adjacent Quilt series (2024) by Al Munro erupts with colour. Munro employs non-objective abstraction, geometry, and textile patterning at the intersection of visual art, craft, and design practice. Quilt is formed from composite panels of varying sizes and degrees of relief, painted with unfolding iterations of a textile pattern. The panels create an ambiguous, three-dimensional spatial experience, leaving the viewer uncertain whether patterns are advancing or receding in relation to the background. Munro’s deliberate, unexpected colour choices and the paintings’ fold-like corrugations heighten this tension, simultaneously attracting and disconcerting the viewer. Taken together, the vividly coloured panels form a complex, undulating field reminiscent of wall-hung textiles, inviting us to contemplate the complex interactions of colour, pattern, and space in Munro’s painting.
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Left JENNIFER KEMARRE MARTINIELLO Waratah and Peony Hu 2023
Hot blown glass with hand-crafted murrine, 24 x 26 x 19cm
Right JENNIFER KEMARRE MARTINIELLO DNA #2 Hu 2023
Hot blown glass with canework, 28 x 25 x 19cm
Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello is a woman of Lower Southern Arrernte, Chinese, and Anglo-Celtic descent. The glass vessels exhibited here represent a new and experimental direction in Martiniello’s work by explicitly incorporating Chinese influences. Heritage Cocoon Jars / Hu (2023-4) are inspired by Han Dynasty ceramic Hu or cocoon vessels, which were traditionally used to hold precious contents, and are considered symbolic of Ancient China’s silk wealth. The series weaves together memory, identity, heritage, and place, with each vessel’s pattern telling a complex story of cultural and spiritual resilience. In Waratah and Peony Hu (2023), for example, the Waratah symbolises Martiniello’s grandmother’s First Nations heritage and the Peony her grandfather’s Chinese heritage, while the ground of spinifex and grass references the Chinese Gardens at Hookey’s Waterhole. The gardens were established by her grandfather in the late 1800s in Oodnadatta, where her father was born and raised. DNA #2 Hu (2023) evokes the socio-cultural synthesis emerging from successive generations through intricate, colourful, and multilayered glass canes. Hakea and Grevillea Hu (2024) reflects the artist’s life journey, featuring the blue hakea, spinifex, and grasses endemic to Irrwanyere Arrernte Marnt, her grandmother’s country in far north South Australia. The red, cream, pink, yellow, and white murrine glasses represent grevillea species from Kaurna Yarta (Adelaide), where Martiniello grew up, and Ngunnawal/Ngambri (Canberra) country, where the artist lives and works.
Liz Coats’ painterly commitment to abstraction — characterised by an intense focus on colour, light, and sensory experience — has remained steadfast despite the art world’s changing trends and gendered assumptions. Coats’ practice invites viewers into vibrant, intricate, and abstract worlds that explore geometry, texture, rhythm, and colour resonance. In the four works on board Essence B1, Essence B2, Essence B7, and Essence B8 (2024) Coats has deployed experimental organic pigments distilled from sustainably cultivated plant and insect extracts, which create a more subtle and harmonious perceptual experience than commercially available acrylic paints. The use of self-sourced pigments has further refined Coats’ already nuanced and intuitive approach to colour. Nine x Fives (2024) adopts a dye printing and hand-painted pigment process on nine squares of raw linen. The work is installed to emphasise the natural undulation of the fabric, adding dynamism to a pattern reminiscent of an eddying creek.
Shrine (2024), by queer multimedia artist Kirsten Farrell, invites viewers to enter a space crafted from found plastic materials, including discarded “exclusion tape” typically used on construction sites. The exclusion tape forms a patchwork of red and white parallelograms arranged in rhythmic patterns with black text appearing sporadically: white in Farrell’s words for light, bone, and the moon; red for sun, blood, birth, and danger; and black for death, night, and darkness. Shrine is informed by Farrell’s formal studies in Japanese and her years spent living in Japan, where she first began experimenting with urban interventions using plastic objects that query consumer culture. Inspired by the Japanese tradition of tying fortunes (omikuji) at shrines, Farrell invites visitors to tie strips of exclusion tape as a ritualistic act, transforming Shrine into a space of collective participation and encouraging a re-evaluation of plastic’s significance.
Emma Rani Hodges is of Thai, Chinese, Anglo-Australian heritage, and creates mixed-media, multipattered, textile works that explore intergenerational trauma, migration, multiethnic identity, and community building. Their piece for the exhibition Finding Home, Community Project (2024) centres on themes of safety and community and was developed using a collaborative process that sought to regenerate social connections and foster healing through shared creation. In May 2024, Hodges facilitated a workshop at The Biennale of Sydney, 10,000 Suns, where participants of all ages were given a piece of fabric and asked to recall a person, place, object, memory, or action that made them feel safe. They then used embroidery, collage, painting, or drawing to express their reflections. Hodges also collaborated with participants from the Messengers Program at Tuggeranong Arts Centre — a non-clinical program of weekly art sessions for youth, focused on capacity building and socialisation. Hodges incorporated these contributions into a banner that highlights the universal human need for safety, comfort, and community, and showcasing the healing and unifying power of art.
With a background in sustainable architecture and building, Ngaio Fitzpatrick uses recycled and repurposed industrial waste materials to minimise embodied energy in her art practice. Fitzpatrick’s pieces explore the existential threat of increasingly disruptive climate change. Crown of Thorns (2024), serves as urgent and confrontational advocacy for the Great Barrier Reef. The title references the infamous Crown of Thorns Starfish, an aggressive species that attacks coral and proliferates as ocean temperatures rise, further threatening already stressed reefs. Fitzpatrick’s glass coral forms, crafted from recycled industrial glass, evoke in their scale and repetition the beauty and fragility of natural ecosystems. Stripped of colour, they suggest the skeletal remains of coral left when the symbiotic, brilliantly coloured algae overheat and bleach. The piece also features repurposed steel structures and pieces of discarded mirror. The glass shards hint, with glittering, hazardous allure, at vandalism, highlighting the difficult collective effort required to mend what’s broken.
Pattern Recognition is a collaboration between Canberra Contemporary Art Space and Craft + Design Canberra, presented as part of Regenerate, the 2024 Craft + Design Canberra Festival. This exhibition marks the third consecutive Festival in which Canberra Contemporary Art Space has partnered with Craft + Design Canberra to deliver a project (having previously collaborated in 2020 and 2022), and it is the first to feature a co-curated exhibition.
NGAIO FITZPATRICK
Aluminium frame, steel mesh, recycled mirror and glass, LEDs, 220 x 120 x 8cm
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Crown of Thorns 2024
Janice Falsone
Jodie Cunningham is CEO + Artistic Director of Craft + Design Canberra, and Janice Falsone is Director at Canberra Contemporary Art Space
Subaqueous 2024
Yarn, wire, moulded plastic, dimensions variable
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Above HANNAH QUINLIVAN
Above AL MUNRO
Quilt 2 2024
Acrylic paint on boxboard and birch panel, 240 x 340 x 5cm
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Above AL MUNRO
Quilt 2 2024
Acrylic paint on boxboard and birch panel, 240 x 340 x 5cm
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Left LIZ COATS
Nine x Fives 2024
Nine panels, raw linen hemmed squares, 40 x 40 cm (each)
Scoured, then mordanted with Gallnut followed by Alum P. Sulphate and Soda Ash. Botanical dyes and pigments distilled by the artist from imported extracts and dried plant matter. Madder Cordifolia, Indigo, Cochineal, Lac, Weld, Fustic, Buckthorn. Binder: Guar gum
Centre LIZ COATS
Essence B7, Essence B2, Essence B1, Essence B8 2024
Re-claimed plywood board, Langridge encaustic ground, 72 x 74 cm.
Botanical pigments distilled by the artist from imported extracts: Indigo, Cochineal, Weld, Fustic, Madder
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Writing on Wind Hu 2023, hot blown glass with canework and hand-crafted murine, 26 x 24 x 16.5cm
Parachilna Hu 2023, hot blown glass with canework, 25.5 x 22 x 16cm
Hakea & Grevillea Hu 2024, hot blown glass with hand-crafted murrine, 26 x 24 x 20cm
DNA #1 Hu 2023, hot blown glass with canework, 25 x 22 x 15cm
DNA #2 Hu 2023, hot blown
Painted
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
with canework, 28 x 25 x 19cm
26 x 19cm
Above JENNIFER KEMARRE MARTINIELLO
Spinifex Desert Wind Hu 2023, hot blown glass with hand-crafted murrine, 30 x 23 x 17cm
glass
Waratah and Peony Hu 2023, hot blown glass with hand-crafted murrine, 24 x
Desert Hu 2023, hot blown glass with canework, 26.5 x 26 x 18cm
Re-claimed
Botanical pigments distilled by the artist from imported extracts: Indigo,
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Above LIZ COATS
Essence B7, Essence B2, Essence B1, Essence B8 2024
plywood board, Langridge encaustic ground, 72 x 74 cm.
Cochineal, Weld, Fustic, Madder
Above NGAIO FITZPATRICK
Crown of Thorns 2024
Aluminium frame, steel mesh, recycled mirror and glass, LEDs, 220 x 120 x 8cm
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Finding Home, Community Project 2024
Mixed media, dimensions variable
Photograph by Brenton
Above EMMA RANI HODGES & COLLABORATORS
McGeachie
Finding Home, Community Project 2024
Mixed media, dimensions variable
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Above EMMA RANI HODGES & COLLABORATORS
Finding Home, Community Project 2024
Mixed media, dimensions variable
Photograph by Brenton
Above EMMA RANI HODGES & COLLABORATORS
McGeachie
Found plastic exclusion tape, cotton thread, installation, dimensions variable
Photograph
Above KIRSTEN FARRELL Shrine 2024
by Brenton McGeachie
Found plastic exclusion tape, cotton thread, installation, dimensions variable
Photograph
Above KIRSTEN FARRELL Shrine 2024
by Brenton McGeachie
