Exhibition Insight... Deborah Prior: On The Third Day
Adelaide-based artist Deborah Prior transforms recycled textiles into craft objects that explore bodily agency; Feminist modes of production, and the personal and social histories of domestic work. She meticulously knits, stitches, and unpicks threads to address the deeply anxious state of attempting to live well on an un-well planet.
Deborah Prior: On the Third Day is showing at JamFactory Seppeltsfield until 25 September 2022
In 2020, Prior commenced work on a long-form climate focused project. Then a global pandemic began. In the same year she suffered multiple injuries after a cycling accident. As Prior found herself immobilised with her injuries-much of the world was also resigned to a similar state of lockdowns, isolations, and infections. Prior’s work is embedded with empathy for those who are immobile, unable to escape the physical impacts of disasters, and conditions of poverty, famine, and conflict exacerbated by climate change. On the Third Day continues the artist’s reflections on body fragility within fragile landscapes.
Prior was the 2021 Grindell’s Hut artist-in-residence, a three-week residency in the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park, awarded annually by Country Arts SA. Her time spent on Adnyamathanha Country was a period of contemplation and recovery. In this body of work Prior addresses our urgent ecological and social crises while interrogating the uncomfortable realities of colonisation in Australia.
Easter in the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene is a geological epoch of our own making. Humankind has caused mass extinctions of plant and animal species, altered the atmosphere and polluted the oceans. Prior articulates how:
This virus too, is a consequence of the Anthropocene; one of many catastrophes that await us. As I wash my hands–water running for twenty seconds–I wonder how you stay safe once the river runs dry?
The symbolism of Easter offers an opportunity to reflect deeply on the shift of consciousness required to extricate ourselves from the horrors of climate change and the tragic state of environmental degradation we have created. In Christian theology, it is on the third day that Christ rose again from the dead. It is on the third day that God created dry land, seas, plants and trees. On the Third Day urges us to activate our covenant with humanity and bring our natural world back to life.
The Squatter Blankets, 2020-2021 are two works from the Easter in the Anthropocene series. Comprised of plant labels from the archive of her land-grandmother Joy. Prior appliques these domestic ephemera onto salvaged woollen blankets. She describes the process as ‘creating a memorial shrine for a garden once vital.’
These Blanket-Gardens offer a window into an idyllic rural-suburban life of well-meaning landscape manipulation. They explore the familial and colonial legacies in the context of living in an unfolding climate crisis by digging up the complexities and tensions of settler benevolence, botanical calamities, mis-plantings, pestilence, and fertile delights.
Pastoral Apocalypse, 2021 is an embroidered backpack, patch-worked with found materials. It was made to carry and hold Squatter Blanket #2. The work is constructed with a base on natural linen, which opens out to hang flat as a wall piece, then wraps and buttons to form a usable pack.
Prior regularly translates fabric relics to explore the wonder and fear of corporeality. She is interested in ordinary domestic textiles and the role they play in the rhythms of homes past, present, and future, and how they might form part of a rich tapestry of domestic craft, care and material experience. Pastoral Apocalypse is embellished with bits of material ephemera from the artist’s life: material scraps from previous sculptures or begged from her mother’s quilt-making supplies. The straps of the sling she had to wear after her bicycle accident; the remains of the bicycle jersey that was cut off her in hospital. Prior describes this work as ‘the most haphazard, chaotic and messy objet I have ever created, which I am really pleased about.”
The title Pastoral Apocalypse is informed by two chapters from Claire G. Coleman’s book Lies Damned Lies: ‘Apocalypses are more than just the stuff of fiction–First Nations Australians survived one,’ and ‘Indigenous Wisdom and climate change.’
Fleece is a wearable textile artwork Prior commenced in 2010. It is a knitted dress designed for the addition of extra length at the hemline, which can be knitted whilst being worn. An ongoing performance project, it relates to bodily agency, exchanging stories, environmental concern and colonisation. At Grindell’s Hut, Prior devised a performance/endurance piece.
12 October 2021
I walked at dawn (wearing Fleece) from the Hut, 1km along a walking trail to the edge of Balcanoona Creek. I spent the day sitting, knitting, watching and listening. At dusk (twelve hours later) I walked back to the hut, still wearing the work.
This exhibition includes a performative aspect as Prior continues the evolution of her work Fleece within the gallery.
Walking is an imperative part of Prior’s practice. It offers opportunities for contemplation and connection. While at Grindell’s Hut, Prior would take 1-2km hikes each day as a way of resurrecting her body from its recent injuries. During these journeys she would reflect on her ‘out-of-placeness’ in the environment and the detrimental impact of European settlement and livestock grazing on Adnyamathanha Country.
For Easter in the Anthropocene, the act of walking synthesises Fleece, Pastoral Apocalypse and Squatter Blanket #2 – three ongoing textile, installation, and performance works designed to be worn, carried, and walked in. On the opening of this exhibition, Prior transported these artworks on-foot across over 10km of Ngadjuri land – from Discovery Parks, Tanunda to JamFactory, Seppeltsfield.
Long Sleep in Ityamai-itpina (King Rodney Park)
In 2019 a friend and fellow artist gave Prior the remains of a woollen blanket that she had found caught in a tree in the Adelaide Park Lands. Due to the biodegradable nature of wool, the blanket was rapidly disintegrating from its exposure to the elements. By coincidence the blanket was the exact make, pattern, and vintage of the one Prior uses on her bed during the winter months.
In Long Sleep in Ityamai-Itpina (King Rodney Park), 2019-2021, Prior appliques salvageable pieces of the Park Lands blanket to a baby blanket, also salvaged, with thousands of irregular stitches. It is a meditation on Place, domestic and public spheres, homelessness, and human and environmental fragility.
Lost Flock
A recurring material and motif in Prior’s practice is the re-imagining of woollen blankets. Functional, symbolic, emotive–blankets share an intimate relationship with the body–signalling vulnerable states of sleep and illness. Ultimately blankets reflect our own mortality through their marking, staining and wear.
In Lost Flock, 2022, Prior’s woollen blanket becomes a site to examine Australia’s recent and violent settler colonist history. Wool brought prosperity to white Australia, a nation said to have ‘begun on the sheep’s back’. Wool also brought the widespread displacement and massacres of First Nations people and the destruction of the natural environment as carefully tended lands were destroyed by aggressive pastoral expansion. The landscape itself is still blighted by aggressive expansions (sheep, cattle, crops, coal). Woollen blankets can also be a way to engage with how to live and work and survive in the Anthropocene. Lost Flock is a rallying cry; a prophesy; a portent of doom.
Deborah Prior, Lost Flock (detail), 2022, vintage woollen blankets, Squatter sheep tokens, pearl beads, yarn, metallic thread. Photographer: Sam Roberts.
Deborah Prior completed a Visual Arts (hons) at Adelaide Central School of Art in 2006, and a PhD in Visual Arts at the University of South Australia in 2014. She is an alumna of the Guildhouse Collections Project, undertaking research at the South Australian Museum in 2014, and was the recipient of the Helpmann Academy British School in Rome residency in 2016. In 2019 she was Artist in Residence at the Australian Tapestry Workshop, Melbourne. Her work was included in the Tamworth Textile Triennial Tensions 2020. She was awarded the Tatiara Art Prize by the Walkway Gallery, Bordertown in 2021.
Deborah Prior: On the Third Day is showing at JamFactory Seppeltsfield until 25 September 2022