Amazing Lace

Amazing Lace

Amazing Lace showcases the work of a new generation of New Zealand artists and designers who have been inspired by lace.  The exhibition also looks at the design and quality of traditional European lace through some exquisite pieces from Pataka’s collection, as well as from the collections of the Auckland War Memorial Museum
Tamaki Paenga Hira, Museum of New Zealand  Te Papa Tongarewa, Canterbury Museum and the Te Awamutu Museum. Historical photographs illustrate the story of how the European tradition of lace was introduced into colonial New Zealand and found expression in Maori fashion and flax weaving.

Lace as a decorative art form has existed for hundreds of years. It is an openwork fabric that unites ornament with structure, in which the pattern of its spaces is as important as that of its solid areas. One of the most seductive of textiles, lace’s appeal lies in its inherent oppositions – the open–closed, light–dark contrasts of the patterns – as well as the interconnectedness and intricacy of the overall designs.



Emily Wolfe, Untitled 46, 2000, (detail).                        Karen Michaud, Crochet Choker, 2008.                         Jeff Thomson, Lace IV, 2006, (detail). 


A fresh look at lace

When the minimalism of the 1990s gave way to a renewed interest in craft and textile art, artists and designers began to take a fresh look at lace, finding inspiration in its exquisite design and fine craftsmanship. Amazing Lace celebrates the current revival of lace in contemporary art and design.

A new generation of New Zealand artists have liberated lace from the constraints of traditional lacemaking, giving it an image makeover, and using it in fresh, innovative and intriguing ways. Lonnie Hutchinson, Emily Siddell, John Callaghan and Jeff Thomson all investigate themes of transformation. They redirect traditional techniques to achieve unconventional outcomes, producing contemporary reinterpretations of lace in surprising materials such as corrugated iron, paper and plastic.

Emily Siddell creates delicate, technically perfect, crocheted lace collars out of recycled plastic supermarket bags, as ‘a celebration of our capacity to create treasures from mundane and unvalued materials’.1 John Callaghan’s lace-patterned paper-cut images are reminiscent of the ubiquitous doilies of the 1970s. Lonnie Hutchinson cuts out lacy, kowhaiwhai-inspired patterns in rose-coloured shower curtains for her installation Wikitoria’s Room. The work’s title draws on colonial history, evoking 19th century colonial windows and imported lace patterns along with Maori design. Jeff Thomson transforms corrugated iron with delicate filigree lace patterns meticulously cut out of the iron with a gas cutter. His series of works, ‘Lace’, hint at lace curtains and wrought iron lace typical of 19th century villas in New Zealand.

Emily Wolfe, Nic Moon and Kate Rivers associate lace with domesticity, memory and family heirlooms. Wolfe pays homage to the ethereal beauty of old, discarded lace curtains and lace collars in a series of evocative paintings. Her exquisitely painted portrait of a cherished piece of lace, Lace Collar 2, is designed to conjure up images of early pioneer women who continued to wear lace, despite its unsuitability in the harsh conditions of colonial New Zealand.

Nic Moon’s installation comprises an old lace wedding dress from which the fabric has been cut, leaving only the seams of the dress. It is intended as ‘an acknowledgement of the early European women settlers, many of whom arrived in Aotearoa with very little in the way of “finery”.’2

For Moon, the lace dress is a symbol of the traditions these women brought with them and passed on to their children and grandchildren. Kate Rivers’ works are a very personal homage to her grandmother and ‘deal with memories associated with domestic activities from experiences with my grandmother’.3 She creates intimate, abstract, evocative images of lacy ladies’ handkerchiefs, using techniques that include photogram, drawing, stitching and frottage. To produce her photograms, Rivers has placed the lace hankies on photographic paper and exposed them to light. The technique captures the crisp details of the lace against a background of rich black.



Emily Siddell, Lace Collar, 2006, (detail).                      John Callaghan, Rose & Bird II, 2006, (detail).              Emily Wolfe, Collar 2, 2000, (detail). 
  

The overlooked object is the theme of Tori Ferguson’s and Victoria McIntosh’s work. Both make use of found lace. Tori Ferguson hand-embroiders and collages old, worn and stained lace handkerchiefs and napkins, discarded and forgotten. She reworks and reframes the handkerchiefs, transforming them into metaphors of ‘the interior life’. She says, ‘Through notations on the handkerchief’s surface, the internal world is revealed in the publc realm.’4
For Victoria McIntosh, ‘Lace evokes many responses – we use it to embellish, to set things apart, to be seen as precious.’5

She uses old, discarded Victorian lace in her work as a symbol for the lack of family history that is the plight of many adopted children. An adopted child herself, McIntosh has been denied access to part of her early personal history under the closed adoption system prevalent up to the 1980s. She has created her own rather unsettling family heirloom, My Invented History, by interweaving human hair through the lace of a vintage infant gown.

Rosie White also seeks to inject ordinary domestic objects with new insights and
political statements. She has embellished a piece of domestic linen with her own machine-made lace. Close inspection reveals the stains that White has deliberately incorporated into the fabric, metaphors for domestic violence hidden ‘behind closed doors’.

Yvonne Todd draws on traditions of commercial and studio photography in her work, which examines popular representations of femininity through clothing, make-up and expression. Her staged photographs of heavily made-up, passive young women imprisoned in vintage lace dresses and bridal clothing are disturbing and haunting. Todd favours dresses with high-necked lace collars that appear to enclose and restrain the model. She says, ‘I like to give a sense of the theatrical and historical, to render my characters iconic.’6

Yasmin Dubrau makes use of ultra-feminine materials and techniques to explore the fantastical life of jewellery. She often uses tiny pieces of found lace in her work because of its highly feminine connotations. Dubrau juxtaposes lace with handmade porcelain elements to construct intriguing ornamental accessories such as her unusual and impractical finger ornaments.

A number of contemporary textile artists make work that challenges the boundaries between art and craft, using lace in a variety of unorthodox and unexpected ways. Susan Broad, who learned lacemaking from her grandmother, uses the stiffening agent, shellac, to mould crocheted lace into sculptural forms. Sandy Heffernan is fascinated with the essential structure of lace. She says, ‘The knots of lacework are as eternally symbolic as they are practically beautiful.’7  Heffernan creates textiles that mimic the look and intricacy of lace, yet she deconstructs and alters the scale of traditional lace. Dr Jessica Payne translates an historical lace artefact (Shetland knitted lace) into contemporary textile works. Her knitted textiles possess the visual aesthetic of traditional Shetland knitted laces, yet cannot be defined as ‘true lace’.

Joanna Campbell is obsessed with lace. She constantly scours antique shops for 18th century lace, which she uses to emboss the metal surface of her jewellery. Ilse Marie Erl also embellishes her jewellery with intricate lace designs, using the process of roller printing. She says, ‘By imposing lace on iconic shapes referencing Pacific traditions (leis and tiki), hybrids are created that symbolise for me the culture of contemporary Aotearoa.’8 Karen Michaud, who ‘loves the idea of making everything by hand, from scratch’,9 draws inspiration from old handcrafts – crochet, embroidery and knitting. She brings together traditional and contemporary techniques, combining crocheted lace with felt and metal in her brooches.


Vintage lace

Lace’s craftsmanship, beauty and expense – with the message this carried about the wealth and status of its owners – kept it at the forefront of fashion for nearly 400 years. For much of this time, lace was made by hand, by both amateurs and professionals, using traditional needle-and bobbin-lacing techniques – a demanding, time-consuming and labour-intensive process.

A section of the exhibition looks at this traditional European lace. Samples of some of the most famous and highly regarded kinds, such as Honiton, Chantilly and Alençon, are set against a backdrop of historical photographs illustrating how lace was introduced into colonial New Zealand.

Family photographs illustrate the ubiquity of the lace collar and curtain in 19th and early 20th century New Zealand. Other photographs illustrate how Maori began to wear lace in a unique fusion that paired the European textile with traditional cloaks and moko. Two extraordinary pieces of muka (flax fibre) lace created by Elizabeth Williams (Derby) (1846–1922) are featured here, on loan from Canterbury
Museum and Te Awamutu Museum.

Two engravings by Wenceslaus Hollar, created in 1644, are on loan from the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. By the 16th century, fine handmade lace was highly sought after – it became the ultimate fashion accessory, a symbol of status and exclusivity, the Gucci bag of the era. These engravings document the fashionable use of delicate needle-lace on the collars and cuffs of wealthy peoples’ gowns.


Pataka lace collection, (detail).                                        Pataka lace collection, (detail).                                       Te Awamutu Museum lace collection, (detail). 
  


Lace devalued, lace revitalised

By the end of the 19th century, machines had been devised to manufacture lace to meet the growing demand of the middle classes for this luxury product. By the early 20th century, mass-produced machine lace had become ubiquitous and its value debased. In the mid-20th century, with modernism’s shift away from elaborate embellishments like lace, the fabric’s popularity was further eroded.

In the 1970s, feminist art rescued craft from the realm of the hobbyist where it had been sidelined. Lace, along with other traditional techniques, began to emerge from the shadows. Now a wide range of contemporary artists and designers are rediscovering lace, and it is moving out of craft shows and into galleries and museums.


Helen Kedgley
Senior Curator of Contemporary Art
Pataka

Research Assistant
Frances Speer