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Wednesday, 16 September 2015

A fascinating exhibition showcasing the way that women artists have used pattern in their work will open at The University of Western Australia’s Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery on Friday 2 October.

OBJECT LESSONS III: Pattern Recognition is the final chapter in a year long, three-part exhibition of contemporary art from the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art.

Curator Gemma Weston said the exhibition showcases the many different ways in which Australian women artists have utilised pattern, either as a surface treatment or as a sequence.

Ms Weston said that pattern has a special significance in the history of women’s art. “The association of pattern with decoration has often placed it in opposition to ‘highbrow’ modernism, which sought functionality and the ‘essences' of form,” she said.

“Anything considered ornamental or decorative was therefore frivolous, distracting and superficial, discounting both the sensuousness of pattern and ornament and the significance they carry in Classical, non-Western or sacred art.”

Ms Weston said the ‘frivolity’ and ‘superficiality’ of decorative pattern, and its connection with domestic space, became synonymous with femininity, leading feminist artists to eventually stage a reclamation of ornament, pattern and decoration as valid art forms.

OBJECT LESSONS III: Pattern Recognition offers the opportunity to consider pattern in a contemporary context, where relationships between surface, structure and significance reveal it as anything but superficial,” she said.

While most of the works in OBJECT LESSONS III: Pattern Recognition are sourced from the collection, local emerging artist Rebecca Orchard has been commissioned to create a piece specifically for the exhibition.

Rebecca's multi-disciplinary practice incorporates sculpture, textiles, drawing and collage and examines how representations of the environment and ecosystems find their way into our day-to-day lives.

“Rebecca’s work for OBJECT LESSONS will incorporate a series of sculptures, using both found and constructed rocks to play on the ambiguity between the natural and the manufactured,” Ms Weston said.

Other featured artists include Barbara Brash, Julie Dowling, Agatha Gothe Snape, Elizabeth Gower, Carol Kngwarrye, Michelle Nikou, Rosella Namok, Raquel Ormella and Gloria Petyarre.

Image credit: Elizabeth Gower, Choices , 1986, acrylic on paper, 53 x 42 cm, CCWA 868 © Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

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