Autumn Retreat - Tapestries of Light
Robertson Hotel
May 24-26
Many hands make life work. Lace-making, fabric patterning, and embroidery are embedded within histories of craft and domesticity yet also have the sly and subversive potential to be labours of love, longing, desire; and even protest. Learning textile skills from some of Australia’s leading contemporary artists you will make your own lace sampler, fabric project and work on a collaborative wallpaper whilst learning about witches, collective labour, queer stories and magic.
Participate, engage, learn, share and walk away with original artworks in collaboration with some of Australia's most celebrated contemporary artists.
Rebel Stitches with Paul Yore
Paul Yore is one of Australia’s most thought provoking and consequential multidisciplinary artists. Born in Naarm/Melbourne in 1987, he lives and works on Gunaikurnai Country in Gippsland, Victoria, and completed his studies in painting, archaeology and anthropology at Monash University in 2010. Yore’s work engages with the histories of religious art and ritual, queer identity, pop-culture and neo-liberal capitalism, recasting a vast array of found images, materials and texts into sexually and politically loaded tableaux and assemblages which celebrate hybrid and fluid identities, unstable and contradictory meanings, and the glowing horizon of queer world making Rebel Stitches, with Paul Yore.
Artist Paul Yore works primarily with found images and text, utilising waste products, trash, broken and otherwise discarded materials. Yore sees this act of reclaiming as both an assertion against the wastefulness of consumer society, and as the opening up of new and imaginary spaces of self-expression. This workshop will invite participants to reimagine materials by working with unworn clothes, discards, scraps and off-cuts, old wool and threads, unfinished cross stitch, quilts and any other abandoned craft projects or materials that begun in anticipation and have ended up forgotten in boxes, drawers and cupboards. Rescuing materials that might otherwise have ended up in landfill, we will be producing pieces that challenge the banality of mainstream culture and embrace disorder, hybridity and the fantastical.
https://www.instagram.com/paul.yore/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igshid=OGQ5ZDc2ODk2ZA==
Mundane Poetry, with Maggie HensEl Brown
Hensel Brown’s lace takes techniques from various needle traditions to create contemporary imagery. Inspired by classical pictorial needle lace panels, Hensel-Brown’s work tells stories of the most mundane parts of her life: experiencing the highs and lows of the contemporary world.
Each workshop participant will make a sampler specially designed by Maggie for the classes, all of the materials will be supplied.
Repeating Circles, with Zanny Begg
"If you think history is on your side, let me tell you women did not write these books, if they did the stories would be different" Christine de Pizan. While this may sound like a comment on our contemporary culture, Christinde Pizan wrote these words in 1402. Inspired by late medieval drawings, such as those used to illustrate Christine de Pizan's manuscript, The Book of The City of Ladies, Zanny will take participants on a journey through the bizarre, monstrous, sexually ambiguous, magical and inexplicable imagery of this era. Working across time Zanny will reimagine ancient witches, outcasts, healers, monsters and demons for our own times inviting workshop participants to create their own drawings and learn the art of tiling a pattern.
Participants will work alone, and with others, to create collaborative repeating patterns. Participants can order tea towels, clothing or other items of their choice to take away with them.
The reciprocity of collaboration, with Liam Benson
Liam Benson will reflect on how sharing creative processes allows artists to identify, access and develop life support strategies beyond our art practice and the accumulative benefits of developing and contributing to a supported collaborative environment and community.
