PHOTO CREDITS NAT ORD http://natord.com.au

Words by Michael Moran, Curator

REST MURRY ART MUSEUM ALBURY 2019

Each of the works in REST present a form of stitching. Weft knitting, drawn work, and loop stitch are each represented amongst many other techniques and forms.

Of course, these are not stitches but drawings of stitches, the evident labour of hand stitching amplified with Peters’ decision to render these forms in graphite. The process of drawing is a careful and deliberate one, with individual lines of thread visible not by being drawn, but by being left undrawn, the darkness around each line revealing a corresponding negative space. This process invokes the age-old duality of presence and absence, the knowledge of a thing that can exist only in recognition of its being gone. It speaks to erasure, to memory, while the subject matter of the drawings and the labour in their construction speaks more specifically to women’s work.

In her text The Subversive Stitch, art historian Roziska Parker writes the following of 19th century attitudes: Women embroidered because they were naturally feminine and were feminine because they naturally embroidered. The embroidery was blamed for the conflicts provoked in women by the femininity the art fostered. By the end of the century, Freud was to decide that constant needlework was one of the factors that ‘render women particularly prone to hysteria’ because day-dreaming over embroidery induced ‘dispositional hypnoid states’

The REST of this exhibition’s title refers to random episodic silent thought, a neurological state where episodic or time based memories are accessed without order. It is close in its manifestation to day dreaming or Freud’s much loved free association. It is also a neurological state that Peters’ often achieves when rendering her drawings. In doing so, Peters’ reaches a place of consideration that is equally challenging and rewarding, and where labour, women’s work, memory, absence, and networks of understanding all coexist.

Michael Moran

Curator