Woven Worlds: 10 years of ‘en plein air’ tapestries | Cresside Collette

February 13 2016 — May 29 2016

A Manningham Art Gallery touring exhibition supported by the Gordon Darling Foundation.

Maitland Regional Art Gallery is proud to present Woven Worlds: Ten years of ‘en plein air’ tapestries, an exhibition of exquisite and finely woven landscape tapestries by Cresside Collette.

Comprising twenty-five small-scale tapestries, the exhibition celebrates the artist’s decade long journey refining a method of tapestry weaving inspired by the Impressionist tradition of painting outdoors in the open air or en plein air.

Collette began weaving en plein air landscapes during an artist residency in 2004 at which she immersed herself in the breathtakingly beautiful surrounds of Bundanon, the former home of the painter Arthur Boyd in New South Wales.

Over the decade since, Collette has pursued this practice in other parts of Australia, as well as in Sri Lanka and France, to build up a considerable body of work. This includes a 9 x 5 series woven in the remaining bushland near her home at Box Hill, Victoria, done as a re-engagement with the Australian Impressionists’ artist camps of the late nineteenth century and which features in Woven Worlds.

Collette’s unique approach to weaving – normally a slow, delicate process done indoors following sketches or images – gives her works an energy and honesty of colour. Acutely detailed, the works have a profound sense of immediacy to the landscapes they depict and together constitute a re-visioning of the landscape genre.

Accompanying Woven Worlds is a full-colour catalogue with essays by Jason Smith and SinhaRaja Tammita-Delgoda as well as selected entries from Collette’s diaries that document and provide unique insights into her practice.

13 February – 24 April 2016