Curated by Lee Kinsella, Stuffed, Bolstered and Upholstered is included in the second iteration of the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial—IOTA 2024: Codes in Parallel. Featuring exhibitions, a conference and varied satellite events, a key feature of the Perth-based triennial is the inclusion of contemporary practitioners who incorporate and build on traditional skills and mediums of craft.

Moving away from the preconceived notion of textiles and fibre-based art as solely small and diminutive objects, for Stuffed, Bolstered and Upholstered Kinsella chose to focus on works that exude a sense of theatre and storytelling through scale and innovative use of materials. The purpose of this was to create an immersive environment encompassing the practices of over thirty artists working across textiles, painting, ceramics, sculpture and installation.

“I wanted to reframe stitched and woven forms to include objects of scale that are impressive in their weight and materiality, but also potentially smaller works that had impact as activist tools or a strong critical element to them,” Kinsella explains.

Maintaining an emphasis on West Australian collections, Kinsella sourced most of the exhibition from the University of Western Australia Collection, the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art and the Berndt Collection. Among the artists involved are Judy Watson, Zanny Begg, Teelah George and Deborah Prior, while three works were commissioned specifically for the exhibition and these include new pieces by Bunbury based artist Beverly Thomson, the Walley family and Perth based artist Rina Franz.

The crux of the show looks at how woven and fibre objects align with the human form and illustrate what Kinsella describes as “power dynamics made real.” She points to Thomson’s work as a poignant example of this. Part of the Noongar Arts Program based at the Bunbury Regional Art Gallery, Thomson spent time collaborating with her daughter Kyla to create a textile and ceramic sculpture representing a birthing tree. Culturally significant to centuries of First Nations women, a birthing tree is known as a place of safety and security to be used during birth and labour on Country.

“Touch is the foundation of the relationship between woven fibres and the human figure, and this engenders an endless capacity to tell stories.”

For The Birthing Tree, 2024, Kinsella explains Thomson has used layers of eco-dyed material to create “a green fabric form hanging from the ceiling which drops down almost four metres. It’s adorned with ceramic gumnuts and leaves, with each gumnut representing one year of Bev’s life. It’s a very beautiful homage to mothers and recognises the generations of women who have birthed on Country.”

Another newly commissioned work is Boodja: Koora, Yeyi Ba Kalyakoorl – Country: Long Ago, Today and Eternally, 2024 by Richard Walley, Rickeeta Walley and Alton Walley. Spanning 16 metres across a gallery wall, their painting and installation is centred around a series of mandalas representing the seasons, Noongar dialects and important cultural objects like the coolamon and boomerang. “I invited Rickeeta and her family to create a work that spoke to their connection to place and the stories that run deep here,” Kinsella says. “Richard did a drawing, and that became the basis of the design on the wall. Their family and friends came and helped to paint it, mixing up ochres and applying them by hand. It is the anchor point of the whole exhibition because it is about stories of place and how these stories interweave with people across Country and how that is reflected in contemporary Australian society.”

The third work commissioned for the exhibition is The Invisible Thread, 2024 by Rina Franz. Reflecting on her mother’s occupation as a seamstress, Franz created an installation comprised of 170 blue and white shirt collars gently spinning as they hang in a grid from the ceiling. A significant part of her mother’s work was making alterations to the collars of linen shirts, and following her death, Franz found a notebook containing client requests handwritten and recorded by her mother.

“On the back of each collar embroidered in light reflective thread, is the name of a client so they each have their own personality,” Kinsella says. “This work really speaks to how crucial the invisible labour of seamstresses was to society at the time, and their contribution to growing wealth and the expansion of the fashion industries.”

Reflecting on the universal appeal of textiles, Stuffed, Bolstered and Upholstered highlights the medium’s broad capacity to hold memory and information through shape, pattern and connection to physical touch. As Kinsella points out, “Touch is the foundation of the relationship between woven fibres and the human figure, and this engenders an endless capacity to tell stories. We often come to understand or resolve an issue by using our hands – to make tangible that for which we may not yet have words.”

Stuffed, Bolstered and Upholstered
Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery
On now—7 December 2024