Sarah crowEST #STRAPONPAINTINGS

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Sarah crowEST #straponpaintings, installation view, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2016

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studied fashion and textiles in London, then developed a practice grounded in sculpture and performance video. Her foray into wearable art was serendipitous, the outcome of a need for an apron to wear in the studio. Made from durable Belgian artist linen with large pockets, the garment proved so useful that crowEST often wore it beyond the workplace. She instinctively drew on it like a sketchbook and painted forms and text over stains and marks. The apron became a diaristic expression of countless actions and chance incidents, embedded with the memories of daily encounters. Constantly transformed by these accumulations, it provided the impetus for further works exploring questions of materiality and sustainability.

For her Heide Museum of Modern Art installation #straponpaintings Sarah crowEST presents six new aprons which are painted and appliquéd with designs, fabric fragments and playful texts. Some of the works masquerade as unstretched canvases hanging on the gallery wall. Others are draped from pegs, accessible to anyone who wishes to try them on and photograph the result for social media. Once hung on the body the aprons assume a sculptural form and the placement of the imagery and text shifts, creating diverse visual effects and new interpretative potential. The transformative

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IntroductionSarah crow

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and hybrid properties of each garment are extended further by the invitation to wear a three-dimensional headpiece, activating a transition from art to apparel to performance.

Historically, aprons have held social or class significance, and across time have been considered variously as utilitarian attire, fashion statements, symbols of servitude, or markers of feminism. crowEST’s aprons reference and critique this narrative while evoking in particular the idea of a protective carapace imbued with a sense of strength, agency and humble capacity for work. The assorted designs, texts and sundry trimmings applied to them have evolved from a series of encounters between the artist and a range of sources which stir her imagination: rare diagrammatic images by Swiss Dadaist Sophie Taeuber-Arp; Bauhaus graphics, propaganda posters, fashion labels, and a number of artworks from the Heide Collection displayed in dialogue with the aprons and headpieces. In threading these multiple references through her work crowEST continues her ongoing inquiry into the relationships between past & present, art & design, readymade & handmade, stretched & draped, stitched & stuck, painted & stained, and raw & finished.

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Taeuber #2 and Taeuber #1 (wall) 2016

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In this interview with curator Kendrah Morgan, Sarah crowEST discusses her experiments with wearable art and how the aprons express what she defines as a ‘tumbleweed methodology’.

KENDRAH MORGAN: Sarah, the aprons blur the boundaries between disciplines and uses. How would you describe them?

SARAH CROWEST: I’ve always (secretly) made conventional paintings and I think of the aprons as paintings because I stretch them out, use acrylic paint on them and hang them on the wall. Part of me is attached to the mythology of the artist-as-painter and I’m drawn to the directness of simple painting. But I have a worker’s ethic and a need to make things utilitarian. It’s a push—pull dynamic underlying everything I do and in this way my work critiques the idea of a painting as a canonical object on a gallery wall. The aprons are a vehicle by which I can enter into the discussion of what it is to be a painter without total identification with that discipline. I’m intrigued by what happens when you make a composition that is completely rectilinear and geometric, with rigid horizontal and vertical lines, then strap it on the body and everything moves and shifts and breaks up. At Heide this idea can be explored by the visitor who can photograph themselves wearing one of the aprons alongside an outstretched version on the wall.

KM: Your first apron developed as a performative record of incidents and encounters in your life. Have the subsequent aprons evolved in a similar way?

SC: I was continually working responsively on that first apron and when I make aprons for exhibition the forms and imagery might shift incrementally in a similar way across a period of time. Sometimes I remove texts which I have appliquéd onto one apron and attach them to another, such as the ‘straponpaintings’ banner taken from an apron I recently showed at Benalla Art Gallery to use on a another one I am exhibiting at Heide. In this way I can constantly transform each work, add to it or subtract from it, make it functional, or de-functionalise it by taking off the straps and ties to make it into a wall hanging—or perhaps to then stretch it onto wooden bars as a ‘painting’.

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KM: Your approach makes your work very fluid, as the pieces rarely remain the same. It also sustains the life of the object.

SC: I see it as a circulatory process, which reflects what I call a ‘tumbleweed methodology’. The form of the works is ever-changing because they accumulate or are divested of diverse materials, texts and meanings over time. My choice of linen as a material also signifies the sustainability of my practice: it’s durable and improves over time with washing and wearing, but of course it is also connected to traditional painting. I wore the first apron when I visited the factory in Belgium where the linen I use is woven. I saw the flax growing nearby and its transformation into the fabric. Knowing the source and production process of my materials matters to me in our mass-consumer society filled with cheap, semi-disposable clothing, where we have lost touch with the origins and makers. By contrast, my aprons come with a life-time guarantee to repair or alter them.

KM: You have often referred to the design work of Dada artist and polymath Sophie Taeuber-Arp as an important point of connection to the imagery on the early aprons in particular. What drew you to her work and what kind of impact did it have on your thinking?

SC: I’ve been interested in Sophie Taeuber-Arp for a long time, alongside textile designers such as Sonia Delaunay and Varvara Stepanova. A photograph from around 1921 of Taeuber-Arp and her sister dressed in homemade Hopi-Indian costumes fascinates me. I am drawn to the sturdiness and over-engineered quality of their costumes. Further research revealed some rare, very minimal geometric drawings that intrigued me. I call them the ‘lost architecture’ because they loosely resemble architectural plans but their actual purpose and function is unknown. They resonate with and remind me of furniture made by my carpenter grandfather—incredibly simple and austere

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but exquisitely crafted. This familiarity had an enlivening effect and the designs I created for the early aprons echo the graphic, restrained quality of both Taeuber-Arp’s rare drawings and my grandfather’s rectilinear furniture. I based the form of the text I use on a font designed by Theo van Doesburg, who was a colleague of Taeuber-Arp’s and her husband Jean Arp.

Sophie Taeuber and her sister Erika Schlegel wearing Hopi Costumes designed by Sophie Taeuber, 1921-22 Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth © Arp Foundation, Berlin

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Clockwise from top left: Kerrie Poliness Untitled 1987

Sidney Nolan Stones on the Beach, Queensland 1947

Sidney Nolan Untitled (Pebbles, St Kilda 1) 1946

Sidney Nolan Untitled (Pebbles, St Kilda 2) 1946

Madonna Staunton Untitled 2006

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KM: For your installation at Heide, you undertook some research on the collection and looked for works to incorporate into the installation which similarly resonated with your interests and own practice. On what basis did you select them?

SC: I honed in on works that connected in some way to my process and provided threads back to earlier works. The Kerrie Poliness painting, for example, relates to my own works via my Taeuber-Arp research. They share a geometric simplicity in that the formal composition is related to architecture and furniture but it is not either. The linework is too austere to be decorative but it is not purely functional.

Madonna Staunton’s use of paper, labels and memorabilia in her collage prompted me to rummage deeper into my collection of fabric scraps and haberdashery. I’ve previously made textile works with appliquéd fragments linking to myriad back-stories.

Sidney Nolan’s studies of pebbles and stones on the beach spurred construction of the headpieces displayed at Heide, which are new versions of the ‘bobbleheads’ worn in my earlier performance videos. The heads were originally conceived as a device so that the wearer can be both present and hidden. I champion the introverted!

I enjoy finding artists whose output aesthetically bears a connection to my own but then further investigation reveals an entirely different impetus and thought process to mine. Starting a dialogue with the work of other artists and discerning links and disjunctions can act as a provocation for me. Drawing connections between my own work and those in a collection provides a new context for the aprons, thereby pushing my practice in a direction that I wouldn’t have foreseen otherwise.

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Grim bobbleheads, performance video still, 2006

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Pebblehead St Kilda #1, Pebblehead St Kilda #2 and Pebblehead St Kilda #3, all 2016

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Your Logo Here 2016 and Contemporary Rag Picker (wall) 2016

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Your Logo Here with Pebblehead, St Kilda #1 and Taeuber #2 with Pebblehead, St Kilda #2, all 2016

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Residue of Some Fierce Action 2016 with Pebblehead, St Kilda #2, 2016

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Residue of Some Fierce Action, 2016 and Very Little, Almost Nothing, $11:11 (wall) 2016

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List

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orks Works by Sarah crowEST

Contemporary Rag Picker 2016

acrylic paint, appliquéd synthetic

tape on linen canvas

166 cm x 106 cm

Pebblehead St Kilda #1 2016

felt, cotton thread, acrylic paint, coffee grains

54 cm x 38 cm x 30 cm (irreg.)







Residue of Some Fierce Action 2016

acrylic paint, appliquéd found fabrics, synthetic

tape and woven labels on linen canvas

157 cm x 105 cm

Taeuber #1 2016

acrylic paint on linen canvas

167 cm x 106 cm

Taeuber #2 2016


167 cm x 106 cm

Very Little, Almost Nothing, $11:11 2016

acrylic paint, appliquéd found fabrics, synthetic

tape and woven labels on linen canvas

166 cm X 108 cm

Your Logo Here 2016


156 cm x 100 cm

Works from Heide Museum of Modern Art Collection

Sidney Nolan

Untitled (Pebbles, St Kilda 1) 1946

monotype, gouache

23.5 x 30.9 cm

Heide Museum of Modern Art

Bequest of Barrett Reid 2000

Sidney Nolan

Untitled (Pebbles, St Kilda 2) 1946

monotype, gouache

24.5 x 30.9 cm


Bequest of Barrett Reid 2000

Sidney Nolan

Stones on the Beach, Queensland 1947

monotype, gouache

25 x 31.7 cm


Gift of Barrett Reid 1993

Kerrie Poliness

Untitled 1987

enamel on board

39.5 x 36.6 cm


The Baillieu Myer Collection of the ‘80s

Madonna Staunton

Untitled 2006

paper collage

15 x 12 cm


Gift of Doug Hall AM 2013

All works courtesy of the artist

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Biography

Sarah crowEST

British-born artist Sarah crowEST studied fashion and textiles at the Medway College of Design and Hornsey College of Art in London in the 1970s. She emigrated to Australia in 1985 and pursued freelance work in the design industry in Sydney and Adelaide while developing her art practice. In 2008 crowEST completed a Master’s research project; Me, my other self and I: exploring the functions of the alter-ego in contemporary visual arts practice at the South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia, Adelaide. After moving to Melbourne in 2009, she undertook further studies at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, and was awarded a PhD in 2013 for her practice-led research project An Unaccountable Mass: bothersome matter and the humorous life of forms. Sarah crowEST lives and works in Melbourne.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Running Order, Studio 12 Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 2015; The Gertrude Sequence, Gallery 9, Sydney, 2014; SELVEDGE_ORDER_RUPTURE, West Space, Melbourne, 2014; A Serious of Objects, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, 2014; SOFT_HARD_EASY, C3 Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, 2013; Tumbleweed Methodology: a theory of the cycle of things, Craft Victoria, Melbourne, 2013; and The Inexplicable Magnetism of an Alien Object, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, 2012.

Recent selected group exhibitions include: FABRiK: conceptual, minimalist and performative approaches to textiles, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2016; The Material Turn, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, 2015; From the Collection: Gertrude Regional Residencies, Chapter Three, Benalla Art Gallery, Victoria, 2015; Cave Painting, CAVES, Melbourne, 2015; Mind the Gap, Casula Powerhouse, Sydney, 2014; BETTER FASTER STRONGER, C3 Project Space, Melbourne Art Fair, 2014; and Loosely Speaking, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 2013.

CrowEST was a Gertrude Contemporary resident studio artist for 2013–2015. In 2008 she was a recipient of the Anne and Gordon Samstag International Travel/Study Scholarship and spent a year in Lisbon, Portugal at Escola MAUMAUS in the independent study program.

CrowEST’s paintings and textile works are held in the following public collections: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Ararat Regional Gallery, Victoria; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; and the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Her work is also held in private collections in Australia and overseas.

Published to accompany the exhibition

Sarah crowEST: #strapopaintings Curated by Kendrah Morgan

Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne 27 February – 29 May 2016

© 2016 Heide Museum of Modern Art, the artist, authors, designer and photographers.

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means whatsoever without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

Design: Ramona Lindsay Photography: Christian Capurro, pages 1, 2, 6, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24 ISBN: 978-1-921330-48-3

Sophie Taeuber and her sister Erika Schlegel wearing Hopi Costumes designed by Sophie Taeuber, 1921-22 Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth Reproduced with the permission of the Arp Foundation, Berlin

Cover image: Sarah crowEST Contemporary Rag Picker 2016

Back cover image: Your Logo Here with Pebblehead, St Kilda #1 and Contemporary Rag Picker (wall) all 2016

Heide Museum of Modern Art 7 Templestowe Road Bulleen Victoria 3105 Australia T + 61 3 9850 1500 F + 61 3 9852 0154 heide.com.au

This exhibition has been supported by the Bequest of Erica McGilchrist, who advanced the standing of women’s art throughout her lifetime.

The artist is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria for this exhibition.


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Sarah crowEST #STRAPONPAINTINGS

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