UK Frederick, Flanniegram 1, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist.
UK Frederick
Gallery 2
Friday 22 March - Sunday 14 April
Opening Thursday 21 March 2024, 6pm - 8pm
HARD YAKKA is an exploration of the humble yet iconic flannel shirt. From artists to archaeologists, stockmen, lumberjacks, bogans or Grunge music fans, the flannel (‘plaid’) shirt has been a favourite item of attire that crosses different cultural associations and bridges the space-time of leisure and work. Long before the Work, Health & Safety culture of late capitalism brought the world hi-vis uniforms, the flannel shirt was associated with the trades, rural life and the working classes. Hence, the show may be read within the context of modern and contemporary artworks and portrait studies of the worker, the proletariat, and other complex historical associations between art and work, including the relations between artists and their affective labour and unpaid efforts. In HARD YAKKA Frederick draws upon past photographic practices and theory to look at how the sensory qualities of disembodied clothing and personal items are employed to invoke loss and also induce sensorial memory.
HARD YAKKA is inspired by Frederick’s observations of everyday slog and toil and her ongoing interests in the material traces made through human action; the contested value of everyday things; and the capacity of visual and sonic media to conjure different temporalities. As objects, traces, patterns and mnemonics of bodily gesture and form, Frederick’s artworks invite us to consider the nexus and the tensions between presence/absence, abstraction/representation and conceptual and decorative expression.
About the Artist
UK Frederick is an artist and researcher whose creative practice centres on visual encounters with the everyday and the overlooked, and whose primary modes of making include photography, printmaking, ceramics and installation. Grounded in processes of deep attentiveness, interdisciplinarity and experimentation Frederick often works with found objects and images in a conceptual and transformative way to question how value is created and remade in the contemporary world.
Frederick completed her doctorate in Visual Arts at the ANU School of Art in 2013. She has been the recipient of several grants and prizes, including an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award for her project ‘Visualising Archaeologies: Art and the creation of contemporary archaeology’. Currently a Senior Research Fellow in Art and Heritage at the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra, Frederick lives in Canberra on the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people.
