With an enduring interest in textiles, Canberra-based artist Al Munro has in the past made paintings based on their pattern. More recently she has been experimenting with a more extended form of translation by transferring the content of those paintings back into textiles “to see what happens”. Like a game of whispers, things change along the way, and unexpected elements emerge.
Coming from a mathematical background, which was part of her PhD, she likes to look at how those pattern systems exist and the possible connection to minimalist abstraction in painting. She is especially curious about how specific characteristics of textile patterns – such as pleating or distortions – might transfer into painting, and back again into textiles.
Visitors to Craft ACT will see both her paintings and their expression as textiles, such as square paintings that are translated into cushions, with curious effects on the repeat patterning as the fine art transfers into design. Other paintings are based on garments, in this case classic A-line dresses. “I have an interest in the 1960s paper dresses,” Munro says. “A lot of those used very geometric patterns, or the designers worked with artists to put the patterns on to the dresses.” She owns one and thought about its silhouette while working on the templates for her new body of work.
It will come as little wonder that she says she is fascinated by the surface and structural qualities of fabrics – the way they have elasticity in their movement, and the way they drape and fall.
Pattern Translation
Al Munro
Craft ACT
11 July–31 August
This article was originally published in the July/August 2019 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
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 Anmatyerr artist Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana’s first solo exhibition in Melbourne—which focuses on the Central Desert food source Arnwekety (bush plum)—the influence and love of her Country and culture is palpable. Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana is now showing at Niagara Galleries.
With their iconic painted poker machines and installations, notably featured in the 2020 Biennale of Sydney, the Tennant Creek Brio are now taking over Melbourne with a new show at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
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.
In her latest exhibition at THIS IS NO FANTASY, Ellen Dahl presents works from an ongoing photographic series that has captured many sites—from the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard to Tasmania—creating a dialogue between works that center place.
