Zu design, me & JBC. Wear Worn Adorn. Zu Design & Jane Bowden. Zu Design and JamFactory, 8 Sep 2024

 

Textiles are certainly experiencing a new visibility. Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, which opened earlier this year at London’s Barbican Art Gallery is one in a series of major international exhibitions of textiles in recent years. Describing this year’s Venice Biennale as ‘a textile- and painting-heavy edition’, Frieze magazine nominated the work of Dana Awartani as one of the fabric-based highlights. As art observers will recall, Awartani’s stunning installation at the Samstag Museum was also one of the highlights of this year’s Adelaide Festival of Arts.

 

Now the Art Gallery of South Australia has announced its upcoming exhibition Radical Textiles, which will present works by ‘more than 150 artists, designers and activists to explore how textiles have marked acts of resistance, revival, remembrance and reconciliation over the past 150 years.’ A number of South Australian practitioners and designers will participate in Radical Textiles including prominent textile-based artists Kay Lawrence, Julia Robinson and Sera Waters. Robinson is SALA’s focus artist for 2024 and her resolutely earthy solo exhibition titled Split by the Spade – echoing a line from Seamus Heaney’s stark poem about the Irish potato famine – was staged at Adelaide Central Gallery. (Until November, a selection of earlier works, Julia Robinson: Sculptural storytelling may be viewed in the vestibule and four of AGSA’s galleries.)

 

Unsurprisingly, images by photographer Deborah Paauwe will also feature in the AGSA exhibition, since she has consistently used vintage fashion as a vehicle for the staging of her performative tableaux – capsule worlds defined by a sense of nostalgia, untouched by the technological trappings of the twenty-first century. In The Other Twin – her recent SALA exhibition at GAG Projects – crocheted doilies served as the latest in an ongoing series of inventive identity-obscuring devices. (See Chris Reid’s review on this website, here.)

 

Interestingly, Radical Textiles’ eclectic range of artists and designers also includes Adelaide-based contemporary jewellers, Jane Bowden and Catherine Buddle, whose deft deployment of textiles and textile processes is on view in three exhibitions. Occupying the JamFactory’s two smaller gallery spaces, the exhibitions Wear Worn Adorn and Zu Design & Jane Bowden bookend Julie Blyfield’s superb Chasing a Passion ICON exhibition of new work influenced by travels to the Great Barrier Reef and Queensland’s Daintree Rainforest.

Jane Bowden, ‘Sequence’ (detail), Studies in beads series, neckpiece, 2024

oxidised sterling silver, sewing cotton, Miyuki glass beads, hand-crocheted, 25 x 25 x total length 1270mm
Image: Connor Patterson @connorphotography

 

With the incorporation of variously coloured glass beads, Bowden introduces a (literally) dazzling array of neckpieces, bangles, earrings, brooches and rings – the outcome of intricate (and continually evolving) new techniques she has developed for this impressive body of work. Displayed in the Collect space, her Sequence neckpiece, for example, required the stitching of thousands of tiny Japanese beads onto hand-crocheted cotton loops that are then secured with oxidised sterling silver bars. Crochet work is also integral to Buddle’s Anemone neckpieces and brooches (viewable at Zu design), which are captivating composites of the finest gold and silver threads, beads and antique sequins. Buddle was awarded a silver medal (textile art) at the 2023 XIV Florence Biennale for a suite of her Anemone brooches and small vessels.

 

Catherine Buddle, silver anemone with ni neckpiece, 2024

hand-crocheted antique silk and silver passementerie thread circa 1890, antique

silver sequins, silk cord, sterling silver, dimensions variable, 410mm (approx hanging length)

Image: Connor Patterson @connorphotography

In Gallery 2, Zu design & Jane Bowden is a showcase for the highly accomplished contemporary jewellery – characterised by a diversity of approaches – of the five access tenants at Zu design known as the Zu crew. They are featured in tandem with a representative selection of Bowden’s current works, such as the Studies in Beads (2024) series – which facilitates new possibilities for texture and palette – and her tautly woven metal rings and brooches. The remarkable Wrapped rings (2024) – studded with the seductive glint of colourful gemstones – evolved from an earlier preoccupation with weaving fine strands of gold and sterling silver; a technique achieved through an exacting process of drawing down strands of metal. Bowden cites the significant influence of the late Arline Fisch (1931–2024) – American metalsmith, jeweller and educator – who played a pioneering role in the adoption of textile processes in contemporary jewellery. (Fisch included Bowden in her Textile Techniques in Metal (2000) group exhibition at Mobilia Gallery in Cambridge MA and SOFA Chicago in the United States.) Further invaluable international exposure came with Bowden’s participation in Australian Contemporary at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum and SOFA Chicago – a successful initiative by the then Australia Council for the Arts which was discontinued in 2009.

 

Jane Bowden, Wrapped rings, 2024, for JamFactory Gallery 2 and Zu design

Front ring: titanium, white gold, sterling silver, heptagon tourmaline, square tourmaline,

4 sapphires, Madagascan sapphire, 38 x 34 x 15mm

Image: Michael Haines Photography @michaelhaines photography

 

For the SALA exhibition Zu design, me & JBC (at Zu design in Gays Arcade), Bowden invited past exhibitors and studio tenants to consider their formative connection with the gallery, and works by 35 makers encapsulate the great diversity of media employed by contemporary jewellers. Invariably thoughtfully curated and stylishly designed, exhibitions at Zu design are highly anticipated. (Droll titles like Zuest or bright shiny things indicate a sense of playfulness.) A striking black and white arrangement of tools – typically used by jewellers – lends a 1960s vibe to the current exhibition’s graphics that segues perfectly with a sparkling ‘Paco Rabanne’ wall of fluttering silver paillettes or spangles.

 

 

Ethical issues are now a legitimate concern, but in effect jewellery can be concocted from almost anything; from the humblest of materials – paper, pebbles, recycled plastics, found items like shells and so on – to the most precious. Take for example, Leonie Westbrook’s engaging waxed-cotton Tomboy neckpieces; Gerry Wedd’s distinctively Wedd ceramic rings; the assertive boldness of Andrew Welch’s anodised metal jewellery; the carved PVC bangles that have become a Kath Inglis signature, or Simon Williams’ futuristic, sterling silver rings with gold gemstone details. It’s difficult to think of a more unpromising source for personal adornment, but Christine Collins, who grew up in Broken Hill, has conjured a series of brooches – inset with silver casts of bush plants – from mining waste collected from the city’s monumental slag heap.

 

In the context of textiles and jewellery, it is appropriate to also mention Buddle’s exhibition The Galaxy Within at Taylor Cullity Lethlean’s Adelaide gallery earlier this year. Buddle was the 2023/2024 recipient of the TCL Kevin Taylor Legacy Grant: ‘Honouring Simon Brown’ – the landscape architecture firm’s late colleague. In consultation with Brown’s family and the State Herbarium, Buddle devised two sensitively conceived and painstakingly wrought, textile-based works of similar complexity, but contrasting scale. A suspended, ambitiously scaled, hand-embroidered representation of Simon’s drawing of a labyrinth wafted alongside a unique suite (or parure) of jewellery crocheted from rare threads – its appealing frond-like forms derived from Buddle’s interpretation of the genetic sequencing codes of Simon’s favourite plant species. (See More Info: Catherine Buddle.)

 

 Catherine Buddle, quadrangulata neckpiece (detail),

hand-crocheted antique silk and silver passementerie thread,

vintage Japanese silk and silver embroidery thread, 450 x 280 x 5 mm, variable.

Detail from parure of neckpiece, earrings and brooch.

Image: Michael Haines Photography @michaelhaines photography

 

In the course of twenty-seven years, Jane Bowden, who co-founded Zu design artist-run gallery and studio space in 1997 – notably without the benefit of government funding – has tirelessly and with great generosity, supported and promoted the work of more than 300 emerging and established Australian contemporary jewellers. In that time, she has achieved a fine balance between inclusivity and the maintenance of impeccably high standards.

Personal notes attached to works submitted to Bowden for Zu design, me & JBC underscore the lively network of intergenerational connections forged with the University of South Australia, JamFactory and Adelaide TAFE. Happenstance accounted for an invitation in 1996 to observe Germany’s vigorous studio jewellery scene at close quarters – resulting in a fruitful exchange with MANU Schmuckwerkstatt in Hamelin.

 

Since 2012, Bowden has been Zu design’s sole proprietor and in a shifting cultural landscape of closures and uncertainty, survival through the unforeseen challenges of the last few years represents a major achievement. Valuable support and encouragement for the community has flowed from committed collectors like Truus and Joost Daalder, who in 2017 donated 161 pieces of art jewellery to the Art Gallery of South Australia; a collection published in To have and to hold: the Daalder Collection of contemporary jewellery (2018).

 

Positioned at the entrance to JamFactory’s Gallery 2, a wall of tissue-paper tags – individually printed with the names of the 332 exhibitors – acts as both a tangible acknowledgment of those makers and a testament to the importance of Zu Design’s role within the vibrant and admirably close-knit jewellery community. Assembled by Bowden’s sister Fiona, it is also an example of the teamwork and the unwavering attention to detail that makes Zu design the undeniable force that it is.

 

 

Jane Bowden, Studies in beads series, bangles, 2024

sterling silver, sewing cotton, Miyuki glass beads, hand-crocheted, 80 x 80 x 45mm
Image: Grant Hancock

 

Wendy Walker

 

When: until Sept 15

Where: Zu, me & JCB at Zu design, upper level Gays Arcade, Adelaide

 

Zu design & Jane Bowden, Gallery 2, JamFactory, Adelaide

Exhibitors: Jane Bowden, Susannah Gai, Angela Giuliani, Renai Perkas, Simon Williams, Jialei Zheng

 

Wear Worn Adorn at Collect, JamFactory, Morphett St, Adelaide until Sept 9

Exhibitors: Jane Bowden, Catherine Buddle, Jess Dare, Margaret Djarrbalabal, Lisa Furno, Zoe Grigoris, Regina Krawets, Yo-Dan by Danielle Rickaby, Lauren Simeoni, Blanche Tilden,
Briony Vickery. Until Sept 9

 

More Info: Julie Blyfield: Chasing a Passion, JamFactory, Adelaide until Sept 15 and then touring

 

Julia Robinson: Sculptural Storytelling at AGSA, Adelaide until November

 

Catherine Buddle: The Galaxy Within at TCL, Adelaide, April 12–May 17, 2024

See: https://www.buddledesign.com/work

 

Radical Textiles, AGSA, North Tce, Adelaide, from Nov 23, 2024