Pliable Planes: Expanded Textiles & Fibre Practices

‘Pliable Planes: Expanded Textiles & Fibre Practices’ is a major exhibition drawing together practitioners who reimagine practices in textiles and fibre art. The project takes its title from a 1957 essay by Bauhaus artist Anni Albers that sought to rethink the use of weaving through an architectural lens and interpret textiles as fundamentally structural and endlessly mutable. Using this concept as a point of departure, the exhibition presents the work of contemporary practitioners experimenting with the boundaries of materiality, spatial fluidity, and process.

Exhibiting artists reflect on the use of textiles to chart social and cultural change, responding to historical modes of production and representation, and underlying histories of domesticity and women’s labour. Works seamlessly incorporate traditional textile approaches including weaving, embroidery, knitting, and sewing while exploring broader conceptual and aesthetic possibilities. Through expanded painting, assemblage, performative gesture, sound, video and installation, ‘Pliable Planes’ presents contemporary Australian textiles and fibre art in expansive and plural forms, altering perceptions of materials, form and function.

Akira Akira
Sarah Contos
Lucia Dohrmann
Mikala Dwyer
Janet Fieldhouse
Teelah George
Paul Knight
Anne-Marie May
John Nixon
Kate Scardifield
Jacqueline Stojanović
Katie West

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Curators: Karen Hall & Catherine Woolley

TOURING VENUES

Art Gallery of Ballarat, VIC
4 March – 30 April 2023          

Western Plains Cultural Centre, NSW
5 August – 15 October 2023

Fremantle Arts Centre, WA
3 November 2023 – 28 January 2024

La Trobe Art Institute, VIC
9 March 2024 – 9 June 2024   

Grafton Regional Gallery, NSW
20 July 2024 –15 September 2024

Secondary Education Kit Primary Education Kit

The Australian Government has assisted this project through the Australian Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body

 

The exhibition’s national your is supported by the Australian Governments Visions of Australia program.

 

Education Partner

 

Banner: Mikala Dwyer, The Nurses 2020. Fabric, plastic, acrylic paint. Installation view, ‘Pliable Planes: Expanded Textiles and Fibre Practices’, UNSW Galleries, 2022. Photography Jacquie Manning.