Exhibitions

We are excited to announce a major exhibition of work by twelve leading Australian artists who reimagine textiles and fibre art, opening 21 February.

The exhibition includes new commissions and recent works by Akira Akira, Sarah Contos, Lucia Dohrmann, Mikala Dwyer, Janet Fieldhouse, Teelah George, Paul Knight, Anne-Marie May, John Nixon, Kate Scardifield, Jacqueline Stojanović, and Katie West. It is co-curated by Karen Hall and Catherine Woolley.

Pliable planes takes its title from a 1957 essay by celebrated Bauhaus artist Anni Albers, who sought to rethink weaving through the lens of architecture, interpreting textiles as fundamentally structural and endlessly mutable. The exhibition presents works that experiment with materiality, spatial fluidity, and process and features painting, assemblage, sculpture, video, sound and installation. It reflects artists' use of textiles and fibre to chart social and cultural change, respond to historical modes of production and representation and test formal properties through weaving, embroidery, knitting and sewing. 

Exhibition co-curator Karen Hall explains: 'The exhibition unites the work of practitioners who disrupt our understanding of how textiles and fibre are defined and used in contemporary practice. It highlights dynamic approaches to making from artists who weave with porcelain, unravel paintings on canvas, and create sonic representations of needlepoint'.

Pliable planes: expanded textiles & fibre practices is a UNSW Galleries touring exhibition presented with the support of the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia touring initiative, the Australia Council for the Arts, and Museums & Galleries NSW on behalf of the NSW Government. 

Image: Sarah Contos, Two minutes and six seconds of bubblegum, 2022. © Sarah Contos. Courtesy of the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery and STATION. Photo: Jacquie Manning