Dell Stewart & Andrea Eckersley's T-shirt Extravaganza at ArtPlay

Here are some images from Dell Stewart and Andrea Eckersley's recent ArtPlay workshop fittingly titled 'T-shirt Extravganza'.

It was a blast! As we're sure you can tell from the photos below...






And some of the finished products...





Click here to view more photos!

5 minute t-shirt trick with Dell Stewart

Here's a quick DIY from Dell Stewart: how to tie-dye t-shirts using bleach! It's quick, easy and not very toxic at all. Perfect for a Tuesday evening activity.

What you need:

• Bleach (Dell uses White King)
• An old t-shirt
• Some string
• A plastic bucket
• Rubber gloves
  
• Access to a sink

Step 1: Get your t-shirt and twist it like a sweet danish roll or an escargot pastry (either counter clockwise or clockwise, depending on which way you'd like your swirls to go).



Step 2: Secure your twist with a bit of string by wrapping it around the t-shirt so that the fabric stays put.



Step 3: Put your gloves on!! (This is important, hence the two exclamation marks) This is because you'll now be working with bleach.



Step 4: Pour the bleach into the bucket first. Just a little bit will do!



Step 6: Once you've got your bleach in the bucket, pop the t-shirt in and give it a poke around so that it soaks up the bleach. You'll begin to see the bleach taking effect almost instantly!

Dell went easy on the bleach, but it doesn't mean you have to!

Step 7: After a couple of minutes, take the t-shirt out, undo the string and give it a rinse in the sink. The bleach smells a bit, so make sure you're in a well ventilated area.


Step 8: Hey presto! The finished product. Now you have some snazzy new threads for that Tuesday night on the couch.


Thanks to Dell for showing us this great DIY!

A Peculiar Geometry

A Peculiar Geometry


“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
Herman Melville, Moby Dick


Space and time are perhaps the most familiar features of lived experience. They are also the most beguiling. Space and time appear as eternally fixed essences, fundamental to the character of reality, unyielding to the vagaries of conduct and perception. Yet for all the familiarity of space and time, the appearance of stability remains a mysterious illusion. The everyday experience of space rarely accords with a classical geometry of planes and fixed distances. For space is always experienced as a process of movement and rest, of travel, communication and associations. The earth is never still and distances are never fixed.

Kant was the first to perceive this ‘enfolding’ of space and time in the movements of a thinking, feeling body. Space and time exhibit for Kant, the properties of pure intuition. We experience space and time as subjective points of perspective and movement. Space and time are meaningful only in relation to our experience of this perspective, such that any notion of an objective, geometrical space must remain an abstraction, perhaps even an illusion. The world might be mapped, its contours measured and its expanses navigated, but the space of maps is never the space of the living body. No map has ever captured the experience of place; the living, affective, cognitive and emotional experience of being in the world. To chart the disjunctive spaces and jarring temporalities of this life-world requires a different kind of map, more sensitive to affective rhythms of embodiment and place.

Andrea Eckersley and Dell Stewart’s work explores the spaces and temporalities of embodiment and place. Each artist works between the geometrical space of surfaces and distance and the subjective life-world of experience and movement. Each artist creates work that addresses the body directly, taking the fixed spaces of the canvas, the silk-screen, the dress-maker’s pattern and the ornament, warping and moulding these spaces to accommodate the body’s peculiar geometry. The triangle provides an ideal example of the abstract surfaces of geometrical space and the ways these surfaces must be continuously distorted to fit the living body. Scales lift off
the surface of the canvas only to land in the imbricated folds of the adjacent garment.

To wrap the body in the abstract geometry of the triangle is to be reminded of the intensity of lived place and the inhuman flatness of extensive space. It is to force the living, feeling, thinking body back into space. It is to introduce the body’s sinuous folds into the flat abstractions of geometrical surfaces. Space and time are undeniable constraints – few bodies escape gravity and few bodies elude time. Yet to regard space and time as fundamental and immutable essences is to refuse the affective and corporeal potential that space and time present. All spaces are lived spaces; all time is experienced. Eckersley and Stewart remind us of the lived, felt, affective and relational dimensions of space and our desire to recover a place for the body, for experience itself.



Cameron Duff

SIGNAL workshop: Dell Stewart & Andrea Eckersley

Current Gallery 2 exhibitors Dell Stewart and Andrea Eckersley recently facilitated a t-shirt customisation workshop at SIGNAL.

Here are some photos from the day!

For more, click here to view images.

Half time borek break! Thanks Katie :)

Coming up soon: Dell Stewart teaches how to tie-dye a t-shirt using bleach. Awesome!


Photography: Kim Brockett

Sites and Signals

Here is the first of two catalogue essays accompanying Dell Stewart & Andrea Eckersley's current exhibition Triangle in Gallery 2.

Triangle is on until 12 June.

Sites and Signals

Dress by Andrea Eckersley

Imagine you are in a forest clearing, where the only sign of civilisation is the faint track left by a long ago car doing donuts in the mud. The sun creates spots of light on the ground and friendly neon hand knitted snakes lie patiently at your feet. You sling one on as a scarf over your faux wood grain shift dress. A campfire smolders slowly in the corner and the smell of charcoal hangs in the smoke-skinned air. You’ve been out here alone for five days and you’re happy, there’s no reason to go back, but a voice tells you that you must.

You find cotton screen-printed flags and criss-cross them. These are not signals of distress; they are markers, used to safely convey visitors through your world and protect you from harm. They belong to a heritage of homemade craft technique passed down through the generations. The neon coral intensity suggests that earthy tones of brown and soft beige may not be enough in themselves. There may indeed be such a thing as too much brown.

Perhaps you crave fruit bowls, the electricity grid, footpaths that hiss clouds of smoke, conversations with a woman who wears a shade of lipstick called flamenco moon. You think about your plants in their ceramic loglike pots back home, surrounded by endless plains of impervious concrete, and wonder what the simulacrum would look like out here amongst nature. Is their smell more distilled, more heightened, in the city? Would they be overwhelmed by the immensity of vegetation here? If they were left to their own devices they might walk
off during the night and never return – a strategy for survival in a world that requires living forms to constantly evolve.

Your clothes hang breezily on the makeshift line. The simple tunic dress whose orchids resemble underwater anemones . Burnished gold triangles undistortable as the pyramids of Giza. The way the design leverages geometrical shapes draws the eye in and reminds one of things both ancient and futuristic – arrow heads, snake scales, black triangles flying silently overhead on their way to a parallel world. You expand a pleated silk black scarf into a frill-necked collar, its flash of gold a python’s tooth gleaming in the darkness.

Time to rest awhile. That wood grain quilted picnic blanket is surely up to the task of making your tired body feel like a warm waffle. The ceramic teapot is imperfectly hand hewn, but the tea that is poured from it somehow tastes purer as a result. Its qualities of groundedness and generosity spill over into the life of those things around it. The milk jug also contains moments of private reverie. These handmade creations possess an intimacy and richness that machines can’t comprehend.




Alternate realities lie beyond deceptively simple designs. Interpretation has the capacity to be infinite, like white light refracting through a prism. You turn and see the duck egg blue triangular horizons of Andrea’s painting and the origami mysteries of her kimono confections. You’re reminded how the triangle was formed and its boundaries seem limitless. Everything here is embedded with a sense of process and purpose. Fine art becomes fashion and fashion becomes fine art once more.

You hear footsteps crunching over leaves and voices through the trees. The view outside the window of Craft Victoria reminds you where you are in time and space. Geometry may not be for everyone but there’s something special about Triangle.




Anna Sutton

HOLDING HANDS: commemorative tote project

As part of Craft Victoria’s 40th anniversary celebrations we have commissioned Dell Stewart (who currently has an exhibition in Gallery 2) and Adam Cruickshank (who exhibited earlier this year) to design a limited edition commemorative tote bag.

Their design features two hands, one drawn by Dell and one drawn by Adam, reflecting their history of collaboration in art and life, as well as a shared interest and support of all things handmade. Just like Craft Victoria.

To coincide with the release of the limited edition tote we’re running a special competition inviting people to customize the bag. Think jewels, tattoos and accessories, drawn, stitched, pasted, painted printed, pierced, transferred, bedazzled, sequinned etc... The list is virtually endless.

The winner will receive Professional Membership of Craft Victoria for one year and a $100 gift voucher from COUNTER, the runner up will receive a $50 gift voucher and the best entry from a child 12 years and under will receive a special Craft Victoria Craft Kit valued at $50. So get those kiddies working!

All entries will be showcased in an online image gallery on the Craft Victoria website, and the winners will be announced at the Craft Victoria 40th Anniversary dinner, Thu 17 June.

The totes will be available in store and online from today(!) onwards and entries for the competition close Fri 11 June. It will be judged by the lovely artists, Adam and Dell, as well as Craft Victoria staff.

There are only 200 totes available, so make sure you drop by quick-snap if you don't want to miss out on this tote-ally awesome bag!