Fiona Bowring, Gay Hodder's ironing board cover, 2023. Image Courtesy of Fiona Bowring.
Angela Coleman, Bev Moxon, Cheryl Jobsz, Christine Appleby, Deb Faeyrglenn, Fiona Bowring, Gay Hodder, Jenny Manning, Karyn Fearnside, Ola Robertson, Pinal Maniar, Rozalie Sherwood, Sandra Obst, Steve Tomlin, Susan Hey, Valerie Kirk, Yasmin Idriss, Liz Perry, Monique van Nieuwland, Dottie Le Sage & Linda Elliott.
Gallery 1
Friday 17 May - Sunday 9 June
Opening Thursday 16 May 2024, 6pm - 8pm
Open studios are an invitation and a privilege. For the artist, they are an opportunity to reflect, to share, to explain, to respond and refresh. For the visitor, they offer a new way of seeing and experiencing art immersively, often in a relatable, quasi-domestic setting. They are enormously popular events in the Canberra arts calendar, but the opportunity to participate is fleeting.
This exhibition, Creating Apart, Together, brings together works by 21 local visual, fibre and textile artists from the Networks Australia group, and proposes an alternative.
How does it work?
For each artist, and each work, the visitor is offered three dimensions, or perspectives.
The first are the works themselves. They are wall-mounted or on plinths, and range from painting, machine and hand-stitching, to tapestry and loom weaving, book making and beyond.
The second is a ‘concept board’, developed by each artist specifically for the work on show and for this exhibition. With fabrics and threads, swatches and samples and artists’ statements, the door is opened to the conception, development and execution of each artist’s work.
Finally, complementing these paired offerings of the individual artists, are photographs by Networks member, Fiona Bowring. The artists are brought together in a bank of environmental portraits of each in their studio.
While Networks Australia members pursue their art in their own studios, they come together regularly to inspire, share, problem-solve, strategise and support each other’s art practice. They create apart, together.
