Fresh Material: New Australian Textile Art

Abstract

Textile-based arts have long occupied vexed territory, characterised as being between binaries such as high and low art, amateur or professional practice, and craft or hobby. As a genre, it is often seen to sit on the fault lines of fine art, fashion and dress. In this ‘and/or’ space, textile art affects a kind of rupture to its attendant binaries where it can eschew rigidly defined classifications through its tendency toward cross-pollination. And, although it holds a well-documented position at the sidelines of the art historical canon, textile art has the distinct advantage of crossing class divisions even while being implicated within its own histories of gendered and racialised labour. Its broad range of mediums, techniques and processes make textile art a genuinely democratic form of material language. The far-reaching historical and cultural entanglements of textile art stretch back thousands of years. The story of textile arts is, quite simply, the story of human civilisation. Therefore, it has been subject to assimilation and adaptation, economics and politics, power, and the heavy legacy of empire.