kate // Thu 19 Aug 2010
This morning down in Fremantle, I went into the Maritime Museum to see the construction of the gallery space for the upcoming Beyond Garment exhibition. I have spent the last few weeks looking at images of the works online, to apprehend them in a totally different light in the exhibition space. Amid pots of paint, coiling wire and boxes full of broken teapots, the room is starting to come together.
Left over from the Nick Cave exhibition, a taxidermied crow is permanently frozen, nestled underneath the curls of Vashti’s wooden bracelets. There are a few relics that remind me of the Museum while I was totally overawed by the bulging animals around me. No visit was complete without paying homage to my slowly decomposing hero - the bison. The room is filled with skeletons and animals caught mid-pose. Leah Tarlo now aims to fill old glass cases that usually house preserved beasts with her disembodied dolls.
It’s always interesting to see old practices persist into the realm of contemporary art, if the Museum has piqued your interest into the preservation of the macabre, check out Michael Buzza’s gallery in Guildford.
Entering the gallery, the eye is immediately drawn to the far corner of the room where Maggie Baxter’s fabrics hang down from the ceiling. I had been looking at detailed close ups of her work, to be met with a roughly eight meter long swathe of material casting intricate shadows on the wall behind it.
The woven objects from the indigenous collections are among the first to be laid out, and the whorls of colour in Roy Merritt’s ‘Megascarf’ are accentuated by the crisp white background it hangs on. Like Maggie’s work, the scarves are surprising in their scale. The piece cascades down the length of the wall, peppered with tufts of fabric that look like wildflowers in bloom.
Thus far the website has only been able to feature drawings of Zomp’s footwear creations. Today was the first time I saw them in their three dimensional form. The quaint, school boy like leather shoes and sleek heels should captivate all of us who stalk up and down King St, praying for Zomp to have a sale…
Further motivation to start covering that graveyard shift is available at www.zomp.com.au.The four pairs that have been created reference the fresh, nude tones and wedge shoes that inspire Zomp’s spring collection, guaranteed to whisk you out of the slump of Perth’s winter.
However, if like myself, you have been wallowing in the bitterness brought on by a severe lack of heating, you may still be feeling a little dark. Thank God for Kathryn Bell!
Kathryn’s hats have been suspended within and around a bird cage, and it is only in witnessing this installation that I was able to see how all of the elements of her creative vision worked together. One of her millinery pieces, ‘Caged In’, captures a china doll atop a nest of black lace. Kathryn had hoped that her work would not be resigned to a gallery but maybe even found "at the races, can you imagine that? Everybody looking up to see a doll looking down.” The whole piece is surrounded by a much larger ‘cage’, resplendent with Tim Burton-esque shapes and colour. The rest of the hats in her collection float around it like angular birds in an oddly disjointed formation.
I'll keep you updated on progress...