Tag Archives: body

Liz Williamson–a dark garland

 Liz Williamson, Loop Series, 2008, handwoven cotton and leather lacing, photo Ian Hobbs

Liz Williamson, Loop Series, 2008, handwoven cotton and leather lacing, photo Ian Hobbs

Liz Williamson is one of Australia’s most revered textile artists. The exhibition acknowledging her status as a ‘living treasure’ is currently touring across Australia. As a textile artist, Liz has produced innovate weaves that reflect a particularly Australian aesthetic. She is especially interested in the life of cloth, not just its fresh beauty straight off the loom, but the accumulated dignity that is gained over many years of care and repair. Liz has created an aesthetic around the act of darning.

Williamson’s work is represented in most major public collections in Australia including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Powerhouse Museum. In 2008, following more than two decades of dedicated teaching at universities in Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, Williamson was appointed as Head of the School of Design Studies at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney.

For Liz, the principle form of her creative endeavour is the scarf. For Welcome Signs, she has in effect closed the scarf into a loop, creating an object that serves as jewellery, wrapped around the body.

Liz Williamson, Pendent Loop Series, 2009, photo Ian Hobbes, handwoven cotton and leather lacing, 150 x 2cm

Liz Williamson, Pendent Loop Series, 2009, photo Ian Hobbes, handwoven cotton and leather lacing, 150 x 2cm

Statement

Strands of memory, cloth and the body are interlaced throughout Liz Williamson’s practice as she explores the connections between clothing and the body experimenting with different weave structures while exploring visual and conceptual territory.

Williamson’s recent textiles play on ideas of shelter and memory as notions of containment and bodily protection, ideas presented in woven and draped shaped textiles that evoke connections with enclosing, carrying and storage while creating a place for hiding, seclusion and security.

Her Loop series are neckpieces, a hybrid between a wrap and jewellery. They play on ideas of shelter and memory on a number of levels, as their circular shapes draping the body with the contained shape inviting enquiry, a desire to know what is contained within.

Yu-Fang Chi – every body has a silver lining

Yu-Fang Chi 'Laced with lace'

Yu-Fang Chi 'Laced with lace'

Yu-Fang Chi

Yu-Fang Chi

Yu-Fang Chi is a Taiwanese jeweller who studied metalsmithing at the Tainan National University of The Arts. She has been represented in a number of international exhibitions, including Schmuck and Talente, Korea and Japan. She is currently a lecturer in the Department of Art and Design, National Hsinchu University of Education.

Her series ‘Laced with Lace’ involves delicate silverwork that forms organic like patterns that drape over parts of the body. Chi’s work explores the space between the body and jewellery by creating work that does not obviously attach to the body as a foreign object. Her work follows the natural contours of the body as though it patterns the skin itself.

Chi’s work reflects an experimentation with form and content, applying a technique associated with needlework to metalsmithing. The result has the kind of easeful grace that we might associated with the floral garland. But its ephemerality is also a challenge. Like the traditional garland, does the fragility of this lace work limit its durability?

Chi reflects on the work in her own words:

In contrast to classical lace, objects in the “Laced with Lace” series do not have dyed or inlaid borders surrounding a central body of work. Rather these pieces are a natural extension of closeness, radiating outwards from spaces and holes at the corners and seams, following the joints and hugging the body. Through this light and fine “layer” the physical form is part of an intriguing mixture – actively “wearing” and passively being “embraced.” Without a central motif, the objects are partial forms that can be used to reflect on the past, similar to the interrelationship of the skin and the organs, alluding to the certain area of the body. – Shoulders? Wrists? Chest? Posterior? The light, mobile nature of the lace skin evolves from being merely a display, into something that is glimmering and alluring. Viewers focus on and are soon lost in the complex and difficult to understand lattice work, with no single thing on which to focus or reflect. The soaring, extending pattern causes one’s line of vision to move rapidly. Within this flattened visual experience, patterns, totems and messages are removed for a more visually stunning effect without feeling or name.

Yu-Fang Chi 'Laced with lace'

Yu-Fang Chi 'Laced with lace'

Yu-Fang Chi is one of the participating artists in the Welcome Signs exhibition