After launching to much acclaim in October 2011, the exhibition Awkward Beauty will now travel to Canberra to be housed in The Australian National University, School of Art Gallery in September to coincide with the project Fashionably Early in the nations capital.
Awkward Beauty will be launched to coincide with a major national design and fashion event co- hosted by the Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT) Fashion Department at the Gallery Of Australian Design (GAD) previously the National Portrait Gallery. GAD explores and promotes Australian design through exhibitions, discourse and events and is host to international design exhibitions for Australian audiences. The exhibition will have static displays as well as fashion parades and interactive components, demonstrating the diverse strategies of innovation that are repositioning Australian Fashion Design.
Fashionably Early Designing Australian Fashion Futures aims to offer designers a non-commercial space to think. It encourages diverse solutions, experimentation, risk taking and play. To encourage divergent thinking the exhibition presents fashion in three distinct forms: as an image, an artefact, and an experience. This exhibition looks beyond the fashion image and asks: On the global fashion rack, what will make the next generation of Australian fashion outstanding? Can it be authentic, sustainable, and valued?
In 2010-11 Australian Jewellery Artist Helen Britton, returned from Munich to Western Australia for a three-month residency at FORM’s Midland Atelier. Working from the Atelier’s studios, situated in the heart of Midland’s century-old former railway workshops buildings, Britton explored Western Australia’s creative landscape: meeting people, travelling, working with local materials and devising new ideas and bodies of work.
Awkward Beauty is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Helen Britton, Perth garment designer Justine McKnight and Perth photographer Michelle Taylor. Working from the Atelier’s studios, situated in the heart of Midland’s century-old former railway workshops buildings, Britton explored Western Australia’s creative landscape: meeting people, travelling, working with local materials and devising new ideas and bodies of work.
Their work explores the complex notion of ‘beauty’ and spins a multi-layered, multi-material narrative around this; a narrative which is imbedded within the vast physicality of a 17 hectare historic railway workshop site. Each artist has created a body of 10 works (jewellery, garments, photography) as a direct response to the work created by the others. The work of all three artists is informed and inspired by the aesthetics, spatiality and suggestions of identity encompassed within the space of urban abandonment and its re-generation.
The railway workshops are in themselves an awkward beauty: at once majestic, fragile, industrial and domestic. Largely untouched and unrenovated, the historic workshops are poised in a rare and fleeting space between a crumbling history and a tangible future. As a photographic artist Taylor has captured this space, creating a visual narrative through her placement of Britton’s jewellery and McKnight’s garments among walls, floors, cornices, windows, shadows and shafted sunlight.
The children’s book, ‘The Secret Garden’, captured FORM curator, Elisha Buttler’s imagination because it offered her an unusual, hard-to-pinpoint kind of beauty:
“As a person working in the creative field, beauty of this kind, and the emotional responses it prompts, is important because it does capture the imagination. It opens the mind and the range of perceptions, thus possibilities.
Beginning one summer and continuing over the seasons, these artists crafted a project which was not centrally about this place, but which became a part of its story – and it of theirs. The project and its story are encapsulated within this book.
They have compiled a body of work which not only represents the creative outputs of three individual, distinct artists, but a body of work within which each output – each artwork– is a product of the other. I would not go as far as to say each work is wholly reliant on the other, but each is related to the other and in a way, would not exist without the other.
The three artists, tuning into the intriguing spatiality, aesthetics and trace identities of the railway workshops, have challenged one another in the way that only creative minds can. Each has created 10 works, but these works were created as a response, an answer to the other. Britton created five pieces of jewellery, passed them to McKnight, who considered them and created five not matching, but related outfits. McKnight in turn made five new garments for Britton to consider and respond to with new jewellery. Privy to this process, Taylor then responded to the work through her images, placing and displacing the garments and jewellery in a non-linear but harmonious narrative that used the niches and textures of the railway buildings as its context, its (dis)orientation.
The work of each artist has an aesthetic that is true to the project’s title. Each work is an Awkward Beauty not because it is ungainly or unresolved but because its harmony falls to an unexpected tune. The voluminous sleeves of one of McKnight’s dresses (made in response to Britton’s almost Batmanlike rings) at first glance look classically formal, yet leaning in close you can see an imperfect puckering and wrinkling of fabric at the cuff and the seams are turned inward as though hiding. Britton’s rings are made from precious materials – silver, diamonds, sapphires – yet the straightforward grace such materials suggest has been reinterpreted into something more industrial, more fantastical. Taylor’s corresponding photography is similarly unexpected: in one photo the model’s head has been ignored and focus instead falls to her hands which are elegant but unrefined (in the conventional sense), with bony knuckles and unpolished fingernails. All of this made me think of what is important for successfully tapping into the imagination, for inspiring a stream of thought which eventually leads to interesting and breathtaking outcomes. Awkward Beauty has at its heart various components which, when considered, all form a kind of recipe for exciting creative outcomes, for things that are imaginative and tap into the imagination of others.”
– Elisha Buttler, Curator at FORM, Western Australia
FORM @ ANU School of Art Gallery
Opening: Thursday August 30, 2012
Exhibition runs from August 31 to September 8, 2012
Canberra
Awkward Beauty 4
Jewellery: Necklace. 2011. Silver, Plastics.
Garment: Bodice. 2010. Dupion silk. Skirt. 2010. Printed cotton
viscose, Satin organza, Fibre reactive dye.
Awkward Beauty 1
Jewellery: Rings. 2011. Silver, Diamonds, Sapphires.
Garment: Dress. 2011. Wool, Silks, Printed cellulose acetate,
Petersham ribbon.
Awkward Beauty 3
Jewellery: Collier. 2011. Silver, Glass, Shell.
Garment: Top. 2010, Double fuji silk, Shell. Shirt. 2010. Vintage
kimono, Silk, Petersham ribbon, Vintage button.
