Patches of Light - Sue Pedley and Peggy Pedley
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Daughters, Mothers, (Future Feminist Archive)
Curated by Jacqueline Millner Artists- Alison Clouston & Joan Clouston, Toni Warburton & Enid ‘Soot’ Warburton, Sue Pedley & Peg Pedley, Judy Watson & Joyce Watson REVIEW by Louise Martin Chew http://www.eyelinepublishing.com/eyeline-84/review/daughters-mothers |
Patches of Light is an intergenerational project exploring my mother’s and my matrilineal family history interwoven into the context of Tasmanian history. My mother Peggy, a third generation Tasmanian and I (fourth matrilineal, fifth patralineal) collaborated to create Patches of Light, working in her garden studio in Launceston over the month of December 2014. The studio is full of fabrics, art materials, a sewing machine, a press, a spinning wheel, pottery, a large wooden shearers’ table and is bathed in light and the sound of the surrounding birds. We are exhibiting this collaborative work relating to patchwork together with samples of our individual work including a hexagonal patchwork bedspread made by my mother and grandmother for me from brightly coloured left over dress fabrics worn by us in the 60s and 70’s ;embroidered needle cases made as gifts; woollen tapestries; and a silk patchwork wrapping cloth made from Japanese fabrics and a dress worn by my grandmother.
Patches of Light engages with the displacement and unsettlement occurring with the colonisation of Tasmania. The materials are raw wool, seaweed, electrical cord, wire and a wool bag patched with silks from Peggy’s mother’s old dresses and kimonos. The Japanese silk used in this work is regenerated from Harmonica (Setouchi Triennial 2010) where Sue wrapped nine hundred objects in cloth found in the house, worn and used by three generations of the one family. The woollen fleeces came my brother’s farm, close to where our ancestors settled in the 1820s, the area known as the North Midland Nation in which the Leterremairrener and Panninher clans lived prior to European colonization. We collected the dried seaweed from above the high water mark where it had molded into shapes amongst the rocks close to Lowhead, on the mouth of the Tamar where three generations of our family holidayed. (My grandfather was manager of the Tasmanian Wool Growers and was Master Warden of the Launceston Marine Board.)
With the seaweed and wool we are interweaving a warp (seaweed) and a weft (wool/black cord) into the space of the gallery suggesting both the displacement and settlement that occurred with the colonisation of Tasmania. The weft refers specifically to the notorious Black Line of Tasmania’s brutal colonial history: instigated by the colony's Governor George Arthur in 1830, it comprised of ‘a human cordon of more than two thousand soldiers and civilians with the declared purpose of driving insurgent Tasmanian Aboriginal nations from their homelands in eastern Van Diemen's Land to a specially designated reserve in Tasman Peninsula’.[i] The Black Line was intimately tied to commercial interests. As Lyndal Ryan puts it, Tasmanian Aborigines were driven off their land so white settlers could produce fine wool for the English textile mills.[ii]
A floor piece of cast ‘bricks’ of raw carded wool and dried seaweed creates a patchwork skirting board inspired by the architecture of the space and the pattern of the recycled knitted rug, referring to an interconnected family history.
[i] The Black Line in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), 1830
www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14443058.2012.760213
by Lyndal Ryan - 2013
[ii] Ryan, Lyndall: Tasmanian Aborigines | HONEST HISTORY
honesthistory.net.au/wp/ryan-lyndall-tasmanian-aborigines/
Patches of Light engages with the displacement and unsettlement occurring with the colonisation of Tasmania. The materials are raw wool, seaweed, electrical cord, wire and a wool bag patched with silks from Peggy’s mother’s old dresses and kimonos. The Japanese silk used in this work is regenerated from Harmonica (Setouchi Triennial 2010) where Sue wrapped nine hundred objects in cloth found in the house, worn and used by three generations of the one family. The woollen fleeces came my brother’s farm, close to where our ancestors settled in the 1820s, the area known as the North Midland Nation in which the Leterremairrener and Panninher clans lived prior to European colonization. We collected the dried seaweed from above the high water mark where it had molded into shapes amongst the rocks close to Lowhead, on the mouth of the Tamar where three generations of our family holidayed. (My grandfather was manager of the Tasmanian Wool Growers and was Master Warden of the Launceston Marine Board.)
With the seaweed and wool we are interweaving a warp (seaweed) and a weft (wool/black cord) into the space of the gallery suggesting both the displacement and settlement that occurred with the colonisation of Tasmania. The weft refers specifically to the notorious Black Line of Tasmania’s brutal colonial history: instigated by the colony's Governor George Arthur in 1830, it comprised of ‘a human cordon of more than two thousand soldiers and civilians with the declared purpose of driving insurgent Tasmanian Aboriginal nations from their homelands in eastern Van Diemen's Land to a specially designated reserve in Tasman Peninsula’.[i] The Black Line was intimately tied to commercial interests. As Lyndal Ryan puts it, Tasmanian Aborigines were driven off their land so white settlers could produce fine wool for the English textile mills.[ii]
A floor piece of cast ‘bricks’ of raw carded wool and dried seaweed creates a patchwork skirting board inspired by the architecture of the space and the pattern of the recycled knitted rug, referring to an interconnected family history.
[i] The Black Line in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), 1830
www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14443058.2012.760213
by Lyndal Ryan - 2013
[ii] Ryan, Lyndall: Tasmanian Aborigines | HONEST HISTORY
honesthistory.net.au/wp/ryan-lyndall-tasmanian-aborigines/