F RESH MATERIAL: NEW AUSTRALIAN TEXTILE ART Textile-based arts have long occupied vexed territory, characterised as being between binaries such as high and low art, amateur or professional practice, and craft or hobby. As a genre, it is often seen to sit on the fault lines of fine art, fashion and dress. In this ‘and/or’ space, textile art affects a kind of rupture to its attendant binaries where it can eschew rigidly defined classifications through its tendency toward cross-pollination. And, although it holds a well-documented position at the sidelines of the art historical canon, textile art has the distinct advantage of crossing class divisions even while being implicated within its own histories of gendered and racialised labour. Its broad range of mediums, techniques and processes make textile art a genuinely democratic form of material language. The far-reaching historical and cultural entanglements of textile art stretch back thousands of years. The story of textile arts is, quite simply, the story of human civilisation. Therefore, it has been subject to assimilation and adaptation, economics and politics, power, and the heavy legacy of empire. Textile’s ability to retain traces of the artist’s hand lends it an auratic quality, a concept championed by William Morris, the British textile designer, poet and artist who became the figurehead of the British Arts and Crafts Movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although Morris & Co. may be known for professionalising textile art, it had been deployed by the women’s suffrage movement for strategic political ends to galvanise support and draw attention to issues of inequality. Textile arts returned as a tour de force within the early 20th Century Bauhaus school of applied arts, architecture and design. The Bauhaus principles of collaboration, innovation, and bringing art into everyday life reflect textiles’ history which echoes these same production methods. Textile art has long been a form of socialisation and a way to disseminate cultural knowledge. Despite its progressive aims, the Bauhaus school’s weaving workshop was assigned to women students, repeating textile arts’ historical classification as gendered labour. Today, we celebrate those Bauhaus artists – women such as Anni Albers, Otti Berger, Margarete Köhler, Marli Ehrman, Gunta Stölzl and Sheila Hicks – whose works left an indelible mark on the school’s legacy. In more recent history, the political movement of Second Wave Feminism saw textile-based arts thrive, entering the era of contemporary art. In her revolutionary 1984 book The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, feminist art historian Rozsika Parker addressed the “historical hierarchical division of the arts into fine arts and craft as a major force in the marginalisation of women’s work”. At the time, Parker’s work not only underscored how embroidery coincided with constructions of femininity but also sought to “break down boundaries between different forms of creative expression”. Arguably, this struggle to receive recognition has remained for many textile-based artists.
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