Immigration, displacement and memory are the impetus for a new series of embroideries by Adelaide-based artist Nina Frigault. Frigault was raised on Miscou, an isolated French Acadian Canadian island, and has returned to this tiny fishing community only once in the 15 years since she moved to Australia, “You get used to a level of detachment,” she says. “From your old home and your new one. It’s a survival instinct, but you have to become a new person. That’s how you grow.”
Circular linen mounts embroidered with gentle accumulated pastel stitches form part-remembered, part-constructed landscapes, simultaneously Canadian and Australian. Power lines, cockatoos and vehicles inhabit these topographies, and fragments of text in French narrate Frigault’s internal sense of place. Her process is highly intuitive: “I found a piece of netted doily. As I held it I got a vivid picture of Dad stitching nets for the September herring season. I dyed the netting dark, dark blue – like the Canadian water in autumn – and embroidered a cloud over it.” On Miscou, clouds reveal the prospects of weather and catch. In Frigault’s work, they suggest the fickleness of memory and inspire a sense of continuity between distant places: “Looking at a cloud, you feel you could be anywhere, but it’s an illusion. It’s not tangible.”
In counterpoint, the challenges to her sense of place are indefinable: time, distance, forgetting. With the slow, repetitive technique of punch-needle embroidery, the artist has found a physical context for reminiscence, letting her memories pass through her hands into stitches. “As I work, there is a flow of images from the past,” she says.
At A Distance
Nina Frigault
Hahndorf Academy
16 February – 25 March 2018
Past meets present in Leyla Steven’s latest exhibition, now showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and co-curated by Artspace. The Australian-Balinese artists adopts a collaborative approach to restitution, scrutinising the systems of conservation and documentation we have inherited.
Developed in 2022 by Artback NT as part of Apmere Mparntwe—the Australian Ceramics Triennale— touring exhibition Clay on Country, showing now at New England Regional Art Museum, showcases the diversity of ceramics in the Central Desert.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
In his latest exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Jack Ball challenges the extractive history of the archive while searching for shapes that can articulate the complexity of trans life.
Anador Walsh reviews Ivan Cheng’s performance exhibition NP at Monash University Museum of Art—a three-day project, made in collaboration with a group of Year 11 students, that explores the loss of childhood innocence and role of documentation in performance.
Heide Museum of Modern Art’s summer blockbuster exhibition is unveiling the breadth and beauty of Italian modernism through design. With over 170 objects spanning sixty years, Molto Bello explores the cultural impact of this period of creativity and invention.
