Deborah Crowe: Talk

Deborah Crowe has long been fascinated with textiles and embroidery. Once a practice that involved embroiderers spending untold hours hunched over ‘fancywork’, embroidery has of course entered the twenty first century. As an artist, Crowe has something interesting to say about these two fields and over the last few years has created hundreds of witty, observational works that showcase her obsession with textile samplers in combination with machine embroidery.

Linda Tyler, Director of the Centre for New Zealand Art Research at the University of Auckland, writes: “Deborah Crowe takes the idea of a sampler, the traditional mode for displays of technical virtuosity in textiles, and hoists it into the realm of conceptual art. In so doing, she mixes it up for the modern world, sampling sound bites, lyrics and critical commentary to layer meaning over material.” Tyler says that Crowe “offers a measure for the fabrics she has purchased, collected, rearranged and appropriated, asking us to consider how she has selected the stuff she struts: what texts on which textiles, why this snatch on that swatch.”

Objectspace is committed to showing innovative contemporary projects that provoke new assessments about the making, functioning and value of works and practices. The resurgence of interest in embroidery in recent years was captured by Rosemary McLeod, who curated the 2008 Objectspace exhibition, No Rules: rediscovering embroidery. McLeod observed, "there have been conscious attempts in the past to revive embroidery, but what is happening now is not such a structured approach. It is the rediscovery of thread's potential on the stitcher’s own terms, making embroidery not stilted, retro or self-conscious, but creatively inevitable. Embroidery, when it is framed here, is not constrained, but contained."

Deborah Crowe, a.k.a. Brocade Whore, is an Auckland based artist.

This project has received support from Manukau Institute of Technology’s Research, Development and Technology Transfer Fund.

Objectspace Public Programme: Artist floor talk Wednesday 13 April, 5:30-6:00pm

Photograph courtesy of Mark McClean.