Pliable Planes: Expanded Textiles & Fibre Practices is a major exhibition drawing together practitioners who reimagine practices in textiles and fibre art.

The project takes its title from a 1957 essay by Bauhaus artist Anni Albers that sought to rethink the use of weaving through an architectural lens and interpret textiles as fundamentally structural and endlessly mutable. Using this concept as a point of departure, the exhibition presents the work of contemporary practitioners experimenting with the boundaries of materiality, spatial fluidity, and process.

Exhibiting artists reflect on the use of textiles to chart social and cultural change, responding to historical modes of production and representation, and underlying histories of domesticity and women’s labour. Works seamlessly incorporate traditional textile approaches including weaving, embroidery, knitting, and sewing while exploring broader conceptual and aesthetic possibilities. Through expanded painting, assemblage, performative gesture, sound, video and installation, ‘Pliable Planes’ presents contemporary Australian textiles and fibre art in expansive and plural forms, altering perceptions of materials, form and function.

ARTISTS

Akira Akira

Sarah Contos

Lucia Dohrmann

Mikala Dwyer

Janet Fieldhouse

Teelah George

Paul Knight

Anne-Marie May

John Nixon

Kate Scardifield

Jacqueline Stojanović

Katie West

Curators: Karen Hall & Catherine Woolley

A UNSW Galleries touring exhibition.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Visions of Australia Program, and the Australia Council for the Arts, and supported by Create NSW’s Audience Development Fund administered by Museums & Galleries of NSW on behalf of the NSW Government.