“Fancywork and Landmarks are both expressions of my ongoing exploration of the relationship between culture, place and identity.”
Holly Story April 2003

This exhibition by Holly Story combines two bodies of work, Landmarks and Fancywork, along with a small selection of new work.

When Holly first exhibited Fancywork, at John Curtin Gallery in 2000, it was accompanied by ten traditional heritage embroideries. By including them Holly wished to “acknowledge the creative impulse that has moved so many women (and some men) in differing walks of life and often in trying conditions, to participate in a time honoured ‘leisure’ activity that has received little serious critical attention outside the domestic crafts area.”

Holly studied hundreds of embroideries whilst researching the Fancywork project and finally selected just seven to enlarge and literally rework onto large printed photographic Australian landscape ‘backdrops’. She chose these embroidered designs for their iconic status in the fancywork tradition; for their personal associations; and to evoke a domestic and female perspective on the colonization of the Australian landscape in the actions and imagination of new (Anglo-European) arrivals. She stated that, “at the beginning of the project I assumed ‘the landscape’ to be a fairly passive background for the reception of the new embroidered imagery, but in fact it already carried the weight of European art history in my framing of it (the picturesque ‘view’, my adherence to certain rules of perspective) and a European presence was already evident in the botanical names of the species represented.”

In Landmarks, first shown at Helen Maxwell Gallery, Canberra in 2002, there is a move away from figurative, pictorial representation to a poetic evocation of ‘landscape’ as the site of intersection of physical, historical and emotional space. In this series Holly combines materials extracted from the land, such as resin and dyes made from native plants, with motifs from European textile history. She noted that “in both bodies of work, despite their apparent differences, land; culture; body and memory are combined to form an ecology of place.”

Holly arrived in Australia in 1971 and studied at Curtin University, finishing her post-graduate studies in Visual Arts in 1992. This is her fifth solo exhibition. Holly’s artworks can be found in many prestigious collections including the Art Gallery of WA, Curtin University, and the City of Fremantle.

*prices valid 2003