AGSA is the Art Gallery of south Australia. The Radical Textiles Exhibition is ongoing from 23rd November 2024 to 30th March 2025. It is a ticketed exhibition.
The exhibition is a mix of several types of textiles. Garments, tapestries, quilts, sculpted objects, jewelry, embroidery, banners, patchwork, weaving, by artists from all over the world as well as Australian. For a contemporary art deep-dive about the exhibition, read Belinda Howden’s piece on ArtLink.com.
I highly recommend the film at the end, when one exits the exhibition space. I watched the entire thing from start to finish and it felt like a perfect piece to close the exhibition. It will show you how some of the commissioned pieces were conceptualized and created by the artists. Kay Lawrence, who is a textile and tapestry artist, has the most handsome dog ever – don’t miss him in the video!
I was also tickled to find Le Corbusier pieces because he has such a strong connection with India as well.
Enjoy photographs below from my walkthrough. At the end of the photographs, I’ve written about how I came across this exhibition, followed by a brief piece about textiles, women, men and art.
How I Got Here
Two months of attempting to settle down in a new city (Adelaide), almost 10,000 kilometers away from the previous city I called home, I was beginning to miss being around art and art exhibitions. Not only was I keenly aware of the burgeoning art scene in Australia, I also knew that Adelaide has one of Australia’s leading art galleries, the Art Gallery of South Australia or AGSA.
The State Library is right next door to AGSA and I was walking past the Western Entrance of the gallery, I was wondering when I would be able to get a chance to visit. Most spots close at 5pm but, the day I was walking past, happened to be the first Friday of the month and I was in luck! On the first Friday of every month, AGSA stays open till 9pm!
I popped in for a quick walkthrough and my curiosity compelled to write to them to ask if access to the ticketed Radical Textiles Exhibition could be made available for me to be able to view and write a piece about it. The gallery came through promptly and I was thrilled to head back. With the images below, you can trace my steps as I slowly wound through, found the pieces that I loved (and took selfies in front of them, obviously) and was intrigued by.
A list of the ongoing exhibition at AGSA can be seen on this page.
All photographs above were shot on the Pixel 9 XL Pro by Naina.
Previous EyesForArt Features on this blog.
Email Naina on [email protected] or Text/Whatsapp +61429048917 to discuss features for your art spaces and exhibitions.
My Anecdotal Experience with Textiles
My Mother sewed and embroidered pretty much all my garments when I was a child. Some of those pieces turned into hand-me-downs for my younger sister and some even went on to become hand-me-downs for our little nieces and nephews. I have brief visual memories of my Mum sitting at her sewing machine, always stitching together something or another, her right arm turning the sewing wheel manually, continually. Then she would imagine what to embroider, dig out her beautiful and colorful threads, and create incredible floral pieces with French Knots and a myriad other types of stiches that I no longer recall.
She continued to sew garments for me till the first time I got married. It was a red kurta and she embroidered that one too, although, she used sequins and other bits to create a starry pieces all over the top front of the garment, unlike her floral pieces.
She also sewed patchwork quilts, cushion covers, curtains and a myriad of other things.
As a child, I always wondered why I couldn’t wear what I thought were the more “fancy” garments that other children wore. Jeans and T-Shirts, mainly. Instead, I was dressed in corduroy overalls, a white shirt with puffed sleeves, a white frock with floral bouquets embroidered over my heart, fluffy romper shorts and velvet waistcoats. Everything sewn together by my Mum. Now, I’ll take the hand-stitched corduroy and the fluffy romper over jeans and t-shirts every single day of the year!
Beyond my Mum’s stitching and sewing, my exposure to garment stitching was the smattering of male tailors who stitched for the Army Officers, their wives and children. The garments were simple and plain and not always well-constructed. I came across more women as tailors and “boutique” owners when my parents moved up the ladder in the Army and moved out of smaller Indian cities to larger ones. I saw more and more women creating traditional Indian wear for the Army wives and also “civilian” ladies.
An acquaintance of mine, who owns a brand making pashmina shawls, which are sold all over the world, employs artisans who manage the weaving machines, the dyeing of the pieces and then the painting and / or embroidery of the pieces. When I photographed at her factory for the first time, I realized that most of the artisans were men. There were some women too, of course.
The other anecdotal example that I can think of, is carpet-weaving. Again, mostly men.
I suppose, these men wouldn’t be able to continue working on this craft, if they did not have women managing their households. Similar to many male authors, who are able to write long novels and focus solely on their writing because they have nothing else to worry about.
There’s also the aspect of several textile industry workers being Muslim men. Especially where there’s leather involved.
At the Radical Textiles Exhibition, I got the feeling, from what I saw and heard, that textiles have long been disregarded as art, because it was always a woman’s job. Seamstresses during war and peace, for example. And while this is true, my anecdotal experience, is also true! And I found all of this, interesting; to say the least.
Across cultures, geographies, experiences, war and other history, we all hold on to our own truths. We allow them to shape our convictions and also allow them to make fellow-human beings the “other”, for holding on to their own convictions, which stem from their own truths, which are different from our truths, but true, nonetheless.
The Radical Textiles exhibition made me think. For weeks. And that, at least by my measure, is a successful exhibition.
