Pliable Planes: Expanded Textiles & Fibre Practices, UNSW Galleries

The project takes its title from a 1957 essay by Bauhaus artist Anni Albers that sought to rethink the use of weaving through an architectural lens and interpret textiles as fundamentally structural and endlessly mutable. Using this concept as a point of departure, the exhibition presents the work of contemporary practitioners experimenting with the boundaries of materiality, spatial fluidity, and process.

Exhibiting artists reflect on the use of textiles to chart social and cultural change, responding to historical modes of production and representation, and underlying histories of domesticity and women’s labour. Works seamlessly incorporate traditional textile approaches including weaving, embroidery, knitting, and sewing while exploring broader conceptual and aesthetic possibilities. Through expanded painting, assemblage, performative gesture, sound, video and installation, ‘Pliable Planes’ presents contemporary Australian textiles and fibre art in expansive and plural forms, altering perceptions of materials, form and function.

Akira Akira
Sarah Contos
Lucia Dohrmann
Mikala Dwyer
Janet Fieldhouse
Teelah George
Paul Knight
Anne-Marie May
John Nixon
Kate Scardifield
Jacqueline Stojanović
Katie West

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Curated by Karen Hall & Catherine Woolley

Presented with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts. The exhibition begins a national tour in 2023 with the support of the Australian Government's Visions of Australia program.