Physical Motifs
Let us return to the analogue processes and the forms of dedication they demand, zooming in to the physical endurance behind artistic practices. This exhibition entwines works made with rigorous, embodied actions: the forceful piercing of thick fabric, the relentless pounding of grass in paper making, and the tenacious repetition of rug tufting, unravelling, and weaving. Each recurring visual element is a motif. Each repeated bodily action is a motif.
The repetition in the making does not simply lead to meditative ease but opens multiple sites of what is told or withheld. Alongside sustained, embodied labour, some artists create an intervening space for decolonial agency and critical reflections on dominant values, while others delve into their bodily experience as personal, collective, and relational. The conceptual trajectories of each body of work are divergent, whereas the labour-intensive toil of artmaking constitutes a shared weft running through all practices.
Mita Chowdhury’s My (M)otherland explores the artist's cross-cultural in-between space within her diasporic context, as a first-generation Bangladeshi Australian. Hand stitching worn sarees in this series known as Kantha, a traditional form of embroidery originated from Bengal, is a bodily act that imparts in-home sentiments. The slow and repetitive movement as the artist punches a needle through the thick, robust fabrics, encapsulates an archival site for what has lived—culture, heritage, history, people. Bengali folklores and fables are reimagined in Western aesthetics of bold colour and reduced form. Having navigated lifelong migration and displacement, Mita employs large-scale banners in a vivid palette, foregrounding activism and manifestation rooted in this lived experience of uprootedness.
Changing Desire for the Unchanged encompasses photographs printed on paper made of tussock grass and tatami straw, all handmade by publista (Rui Yasue) through Japanese traditional paper-making methodology. For each sheet, publista pounded the plant for approximately 30,000 times, embedding duration and labour. The photographs feature subjects whose social and political connotations have shifted over time. They also capture the Sahara Desert in Egypt that changes week by week, but the transformations are often rendered imperceptible through distance. What is once held as right can later be undone: religion, science, ideology, as beliefs are continually shaped and reshaped by power and time. publista interrogates the fixation of imposed meanings, revealing how categories, values, and truths are not stable givens, but temporary constructions cast by perspective and power.
Zoe Jones’s sculptural textile works emerge in uncontrolled, distinctive forms through a process-led approach. Perhaps the hand-made internal wires (often imperceptible at first glance) predetermine compositions, but Zoe allows materials to guide movement, shape, and energy. This methodology establishes a counter-practice to meticulously pre-planned and representational modes of making. Through repeated actions such as unravelling paper twine, rug hooking, and weaving, Zoe centralises material agency. Reclaimed fabrics with their histories of use, generate new and expansive meanings in organic forms, diminishing human dominance in the making. Each work is an epitome of material memory and intimate histories, with repetition becoming both method and narrative.
Arabella Strachan stretches canvas onto wooden frames and employs tufting, trimming, and carving tools to construct compositions inspired by aerial landscapes, symbols, and talismanic forms. Here, labour resides in the hand-tufting technique, as yarn penetrates the fabric again and again. The surface accumulates through this persistent gesture, building image through bodily insistence. Besides, through bending landscape and symbolic forms into abstracted curves, using reclaimed materials, Arabella constructs an architecture of shared experience and common traces of human life.
By magnifying labour in the making, Physical Motifs is an invitation to behold the materiality and its distinct manifestations in each body of work. It also distils the artists’ ardour: we make works with fortitude, because there are tangible and intangible things we need to say. The repeated physicality is embedded in materials that play a key part in all four artists’ practices. So, can this physicality be read as an integral part of art itself, rather than merely an effort that led to the art?
