27 May - 15 June 2010
about the exhibition
The innovative woven textiles of Jennifer Robertson are a celebration of the poetic language of thread. As if dancing between the warp and weft, Jennifer’s silk, wool, cotton and nylon threads ripple across the energetic surfaces creating distinctively beautiful wearable artworks. For this recent body of work, Jennifer was inspired by features of the atmosphere, sky and outer space such as cloud formations, nebulae, and raindrops. Evoking a sense of floating and translucency, Jennifer’s woven works capture the nature of air in both daylight and darkness, exposed and trapped. Jennifer produced a series of observation drawings of clouds in watercolour in order to develop her imagery within the parameters and restraints of her weaving scale, structures and pattern repeats. Even her use of a floating weave structure reflects her inspiration, with supplementary threads floating over the ground threads, creating contrasting pattern effects. Mulberry and schappe silks with heat-shrunk nylon monofilaments create a three-dimensional contrast within the cloth, while photo luminescent yarn in some of the textiles emits a glow when worn at night. Double, triple or quadruple layered, these distinctive abstract and figurative works are all hand-woven on a unique 32 shaft loom.
Born in Somerset, England, Jennifer Robertson completed a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in woven textiles at the West Surrey College of Art and Design, Surrey, UK, in 1984. In 1985, Jennifer continued her education with Post Graduate Studies in woven textiles at the Royal College of Art, London, and migrated to Australia the following year. Over the years, Jennifer has been a lecturer at Edith Cown University in Perth, and her work is widely represented in collections including the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, Nuno Corporation, Tokyo and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. A career highlight for Jennifer is having one of her pieces in the private collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
