Lesley Giovanelli’s installation ‘Cottage Industry’, uses textiles collected over the last 45 years from South and Far East Asia. Inspired by the richness of these everyday pieces she offsets their colour, texture and pattern against simple geometric forms and planes to create a visually exciting colour field. Simultaneously, the forms create an environment suggesting houses along a road and a journey.

Giovanelli is interested in the continuation of cultural difference in spite of modernity. Her use of these fabrics acknowledges their continued importance despite cultural change and western influence. These ordinary textiles used in ordinary lives are now invested with a greater intensity

Arranged along the length of Articulate project space the simplified geometric forms read on one level as iconic childlike houses inducing an emotional response to the fundamental symbolic nature of ‘the house’. On another level the repetition of the rectangular and triangular blocks in a line refers to contemporary sculptural practice.

The collection began in 1971 when Giovanelli travelled overland from Timor to Japan. Since then she has purchased textiles in markets, shops or sometimes in the homes and workshops of their makers. Second-hand pieces were bought from their previous owners or here in Sydney from importers. Many were donated by family and by friends. Most pieces are partly hand made. The production of handcrafted textiles continues to be an important means of income supporting the cohesion of rural communities. The patterns were traditionally an expression of cultural and tribal identification and status distinction. Today they are more important as an expression of national identity in the face of the spread of western uniformity.

*image (left)
Lesley Giovanelli
Column Four Vientiane, 2013
styrofoam, acrylic paint, fabrics from Bali, Greece, Laos, Japan. 70x 280cm
courtesy of the artist