2015 Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award

Wangaratta Art Gallery 

13th June - 26th July 2015

remembering Wangaratta, mirror image 2014 - 15

sashiko embroidery on silk, stretched and framed

85 x 105 x 4cm 

private collection, Melbourne

remembering Wangaratta, mirror image utilizes the Japanese Sashiko technique from the 18^thC to create an embroidered drawing of Wangaratta city based on a vintage 1975 street map. Originally used to repair fabric, traditional Sashiko uses a white thread on Indigo dyed cotton, small stitches made up of a series of repetitive lines. In this work, as a gesture to the original craft, I have used white thread but chose a remnant of hand dyed Japanese silk which was previously an Akira Isogawa strap dress from 2003. Each warp and weft is testimony to its previous life as a dress, including a diagonal seam which is a signature of his designs, the embroidery depicts a mirror-image of Wangaratta's streetscape of 1975, as a reminder of the process of looking back to access memories.