I first came across Pasco-White’s work in Textiles x Art by Ramona Barry and Beck Johnson. This book was informative in broadening my view of the use of textiles as artworks. When I discovered her work was being shown at Station Gallery, South Yarra, I had to see it. The gallery itself is tucked away behind the main thoroughfare of the Melbourne inner-city suburb, and if you are not looking out for it, you may walk right past.
The gallery space consists of two rooms – a large one and another about half the size of the first. The works appeared to be divided between the rooms according to their processes and, as a result, their visual qualities. The works I was drawn to most were the ones in the smaller room that had been created by torn-up painted canvases pieced back together. They felt like crazy patchwork quilts. Each piece showed the maker's hand through a layered collection of machine- and hand-stitched remnants, combined with painted components.
The works tell the story of her process and her motivations. The contrasting paint colours and textures are foraged and gathered. Pigments are extracted from onion skins, flowers, and fruit scraps. She collects fabrics and materials for the feeling they give her, and not necessarily because they ‘go’ together. These components, along with the crucial layering, exemplify her long fascination with our relationship with the environment. The works clearly communicate her deep ecological interests, whilst the material methods develop the human conversation necessary for the care of the earth.
My interest in her work is at the intersection of recycling, transforming and renewing the materials she collects. Her process of piecing reclaimed fabrics and responding to each layer intuitively resonated with how I have approached my knitting of repurposed scrap fabrics. Where Pasco-White’s immersive works speak of an embodied experience of the natural world, I seek to create work that embodies the connection between trauma and the body, in which the recognition of this connection may give space for repair.
Works below from Material Immortality. Jahnne Pasco-White’s fifth shown with Station Gallery
