PLIABLE PLANES: EXPANDED TEXTILE AND FIBRE PRACTICES
29.04.2022 - 18.07.2022
UNSW Galleries
Sydney AU
‘Pliable Planes: Expanded Textiles & Fibre Practices’ is a major exhibition drawing together practitioners who reimagine practices in textiles and fibre art. The project takes its title from a 1957 essay by Bauhaus artist Anni Albers that sought to rethink the use of weaving through an architectural lens and interpret textiles as fundamentally structural and endlessly mutable. Using this concept as a point of departure, the exhibition presents the work of contemporary practitioners experimenting with the boundaries of materiality, spatial fluidity, and process.
Exhibiting artists reflect on the use of textiles to chart social and cultural change, responding to historical modes of production and representation, and underlying histories of domesticity and women’s labour. Works seamlessly incorporate traditional textile approaches including weaving, embroidery, knitting, and sewing while exploring broader conceptual and aesthetic possibilities. Through expanded painting, assemblage, performative gesture, sound, video and installation, ‘Pliable Planes’ presents contemporary Australian textiles and fibre art in expansive and plural forms, altering perceptions of materials, form and function.
Akira Akira
Sarah Contos
Lucia Dohrmann
Mikala Dwyer
Janet Fieldhouse
Teelah George
Paul Knight
Anne-Marie May
John Nixon
Kate Scardifield
Jacqueline Stojanović
Katie West
—
Curators: Karen Hall & Catherine Woolley
Presented with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts. The exhibition begins a national tour in 2023 with the support of the Australian Government's Visions of Australia program.

Pliable Planes: Expanded textiles and fibre practices, 2022, installation view, UNSW Galleries. Photography by Jacquie Manning.

John Nixon & Jacqueline Stojanović, Untitled 2019. Image courtesy the artist, the Estate of John Nixon, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

John Nixon & Jacqueline Stojanović, Untitled (pair) 2020-22. Image courtesy the artist, the Estate of John Nixon, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney. Photography by Jacquie Manning.

Concrete Fabric 2019, installation view, UNSW Galleries. Photography by Jacquie Manning.



Concrete Fabric (details) 2019, installation view, UNSW Galleries. Photography by Jacquie Manning.

John Nixon & Jacqueline Stojanović, Untitled (4 units) 2020-21, installation view, Image courtesy the artist, the Estate of John Nixon, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney. Photography by Jacquie Manning.

John Nixon & Jacqueline Stojanović, Untitled 2020. Image courtesy the artist, the Estate of John Nixon, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney. Photography by Jacquie Manning.

John Nixon & Jacqueline Stojanović, Untitled 2020-21. Image courtesy the artist, the Estate of John Nixon, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney. Photography by Jacquie Manning.

John Nixon & Jacqueline Stojanović, Untitled 2020. Image courtesy the artist, the Estate of John Nixon, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney. Photography by Jacquie Manning.

John Nixon & Jacqueline Stojanović, Untitled 2020. Image courtesy the artist, the Estate of John Nixon, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney. Photography by Jacquie Manning.
Ж!
19.05.2022 - 18.06.2022
Conners Conners Gallery
Fitzroy Town Hall, Melbourne AU
Exhibition statement
Ж! (pronounced zhe, as occasion) is the eighth letter in the Serbian alphabet, it is the initial letter of my first name in cyrillic, Жаклина, and it is a common abbreviation of the word živeli, used to cheer or celebrate.
Ж! comprises thirty works which together represent a visual azbuka (the children’s book for learning the letters of the alphabet). Informed by free association and an attitude reflective of the free wheeling and institution-defiant exhibitions of early conceptual Yugoslav art groups and artists, Ж! presents a culmination of works made between 2016 and 2022 that have been either created by hand, readymade and abstracted from my studio, or displayed from my personal collection.
The premise of the exhibition derives from a tapestry woven in 2020, titled Azbuka rug, and is a natural extension of the themes embedded therein. With an interest in that which shifts and dissolves over time - the practice of weaving, folk traditions, geographical territories, language, symbols, and sociopolitical constructs - the visual azbuka demarcates my contemporary position within a diluted historical framework personal to me. Through my subjective associations, Ж! calls for celebration of what came before, accessed through the lens of abstraction and manifested in a museological display aligned with sharing histories.

Ж!, 2022, installation view, Conners Conners. Photo Christo Crocker

Azbuka, 2022. Photo Christo Crocker

Blokovi, 2019. Photo Christo Crocker
Geometrija, 2018. Photo Christo Crocker


žito, 2021. Photo Christo Crocker

Igra, 2022. Photo Christo Crocker

Ж!, 2022, installation view, Conners Conners. Photo Christo Crocker

Jaja, 2022. Photo Christo Crocker

Krst, 2021. Photo Christo Crocker

Muzej, 2021. Photo Christo Crocker

Ljubavnik, 2022. Photo Christo Crocker

Plaža, 2022. Photo Christo Crocker

Ж!, 2022, installation view, Conners Conners. Photo Christo Crocker

Sunce, 2021. Photo Christo Crocker

Hleb, 2022. Photo Christo Crocker

čep, 2022. Photo Christo Crocker
Carstvo, 2022. Photo Christo Crocker


Ж!, 2022, installation view, Conners Conners. Photo Christo Crocker

Ж!, 2022, exhibition poster, made in collaboration with Warren Taylor.
REPRESENTED ARTISTS
21.05.2022 - 18.06.2022
Haydens
1/10-12 Moreland Road, Brunswick East AU
Since Haydens was established in 2018, our focus has been to support a new generation of artists by facilitating private and institutional acquisitions, providing opportunities to invest in the experimental, critical, and socially engaged art practices which shape the landscape of contemporary art in Australia.
Marking a significant commitment to the development of contemporary art, we are proud to announce representation of five early career artists - Guy Grabowsky, Amalia Lindo, Sebastian Temple, Jacqueline Stojanović, and Tim Wagg.
Each of these artists have been involved in our exhibition program since the beginning, and we will continue to provide ongoing support for these artists through collaborative exhibition making and an expanded creative direction. Haydens is motivated by their varied approaches to art making and we look forward to assisting the development of their dynamic practices into the future.
- Hayden Stuart, Director

Represented Artists, 2022, installation view, Haydens. Photo Christo Crocker

Grid XI, 2022. Photo Christo Crocker

Grid X, 2022. Photo Christo Crocker

Represented Artists, 2022, installation view, Haydens. Photo Christo Crocker
MATERIAL CULTURE
17.03.2022 - 23.03.2022
NGV Melbourne Design Week
At the Above, Fitzroy AU
Curated by Marsha Golemac
This exhibition is a dedication to the ongoing evolution of ‘material culture’ – an attempt to expand on conversations surrounding why and how things are made, and what social, functional, or symbolic needs they satisfy. We’re often presented with competing ideas of old versus new, as if there is not value in both. We see it in all facets of our everyday lives. But, what if we did away with that distinction? This exhibition offers a space for creatives, and guests alike, to imagine a world where yesterday’s ideologies and tomorrow’s innovations can coexist. Featuring the work of sixteen designers, makers and artists, the exhibition encourages participants to embrace traditional and ultra-modern techniques in object design. Each participant has created an object using a natural or cultural resource with a focus on tactility and materiality. Purposeful in nature, as defined by the participant, the object is a representation of the world they want to live in.
- Marsha Golemac

Exhibition poster, Material Culture for NGV Melbourne Design Week 2022


Grid XI (details) 2022, wool and cotton on metal mesh, 90 x 90 cm.
Photo Annika Kafcaloudis

Grid XI 2022, wool and cotton on metal mesh, 90 x 90 cm. Photo Annika Kafcaloudis
COOKING WITH JOHN
22.05.2021 - 05.06.2021
Haydens
Brunswick East AU
Curated by Amalia Lindo + Jacqueline Stojanović

Cooking with John curated by Amalia Lindo + Jacqueline Stojanović
A John Nixon lunch is soup, reheated on the stove top, with different recipes week to week. It is “only two olives left, one for me, one for you”. It is red capsicums in a pink bowl and green cucumber on a blue plate; an assemblage of colour and form like a constructed painting, which sometimes shares the lunch table. On other occasions, a pie or a sausage offer a departure from the usual routine. Occasionally there is cake, always there is bread.
Enacted almost as ritual, the weekly lunch provided a pause in the day’s work. With John, the table was a site for eating, working, and talking, just as the food served upon it offered more than a form of sustenance or perhaps a new material for his practice; at John’s table, food became an analogical tool for discussion on art and life.
“Show ten loaves of bread, okay, we understand what you do.”
Cooking with John takes its cue from a selection of John’s food analogies, recorded by his most recent assistants, Amalia Lindo and Jacqueline Stojanović. The exhibition is a testimonial to John’s teachings through the presentation of new works by the artist friends and mentees from Nixon’s wide circle who have also had the pleasure of sharing John’s table. We present Cooking with John as an “anti-cookbook” wherein the analogies are the recipes and the artworks are the ingredients.
The head chef has left but the kitchen remains open.
VIEW ROOM SHEET

Jacqueline Stojanović
Yesterday's Bread 2021
Flour, water, two trestle tables
Dimensions variable
JN: If you have lots of orange trees you don't need to show one million oranges.
I began baking bread in 2018, after being gifted a portion of mother dough to care for in Sicily. I toiled to keep it alive under ever changing conditions and eventually transported it to Melbourne where every week I baked a loaf attempting to perfect the practice. The successful loaves would always accompany me to the Briar Hill studio on the days John and I worked together, to be shared at the lunch table. The unsuccessful loaves were reserved for me alone to critically deconstruct.
Both at the tables, for lunch and for work, we talked about bread. These conversations meandered through the political and proletariat to the spiritual and ritualistic associations of bread as matter and metaphor, and in discussion John introduced me to the personal history of bread artworks by friends in his circle. But mostly, I felt that bread for me was as potatoes were for John, a symbol of labour commonly understood and consumed. How different is making a tapestry and baking a loaf of bread?
The successful loaf harnesses all essential elements of life: earth, water, air and fire, with good timing.
In 2019 I made an exhibition titled Bread + Games after the metonymic phrase referring to superficial appeasement. As part of this exhibition I painted my bread and displayed it on the wall. John didn’t mess around with any superficial appeasement, and spent weighted words with me about the bread, the paint, the wall. It’s everything it needs to be left plain on a table.
So, bon appetit John; a table for lunch and a table for work, and a second chance for yesterday’s bread.




Photos Christo Crocker

A THREAD BETWEEN
12.03.2022 - 09.04.2022
ReadingRoom
Northcote AU
Jordan Mitchell-Fletcher + Jacqueline Stojanović
Exhibition text written by Emma Nixon


Untitled (portrait) 2021, handwoven tapestry made of wool and jute, 74 x 74.5 cm.


Trileće 2022, handwoven tapestry made of wool and jute, 75 x 69 cm.



Twill 3, Twill 2, Hopsack 2, Twill 1, Hopsack 1 2022, coloured pencil on wooden blocks on plywood, 10 x 10 x 3 cm (each).

Colour field drawing 2022, coloured pencil on wooden blocks on plywood, 30 x 30 x 3 cm.
a thread between | exhibition text by Emma Nixon
A thread is used to mend or hold together— weaving itself in and out, in and out until it becomes intrinsic to a fabric and connects itself to a wider whole. The thread throughout this exhibition is the synergy of Jacqueline Stojanović and Jordan Mitchell-Fletcher’s friendship and collaboration, it is the magnetic force between them.
Jacqueline describes the movement of weaving as a “dance in form and colour.” This exhibition pirouettes poetically between the bright pops of colour in Jacqueline’s drawings, and the deep navy and raw brown in her tapestries, which are paired with the polished and irregular textures of Jordan’s ceramic tiles, her intense terracotta marbling on earthenware and her shadowed graphite pencil drawings. Jacqueline and Jordan’s exhibition speaks to their own personal connection as friends and fellow artists, but also to broader traditions of craft and women’s work. Weaving and tiling are their primary respective mediums, ancient methods that intersect beauty with function. By continuing these traditions within their contemporary art practices, these two artists keep them alive, carrying them on. Driven by a strong work ethic, they are constantly teaching themselves new ways of making art and honing the skills of their mediums. Their collective inquiry into the form of the square and the diamond is explored through wood, wool and ceramic, all materials belonging to the Earth. This is harmonised with a focus on working with their hands and utilizing tools— a loom, a kiln.
Jacqueline experiences weaving as both a social and solitary space. As a discipline, it has connected her to many people, notably weavers in the countries she calls home, both in Pirot, Serbia and in Langwarrin, Victoria. A master weaver of the McClelland Spinners and Weavers Guild gifted Jacqueline the table loom she works on now, one woman passing on knowledge and equipment to another. The wool she uses is sometimes gifted from a friend. But weaving also requires many hours alone, a pouring of energy, one to one, between artist and apparatus. An embodiment of that labour and time, the artworks then take on their own stories. Jacqueline has also begun to teach weaving, and the oral histories continue.
Seeing her practice as a study of processes, Jordan spends a long time with her ceramics, each piece carved by hand, fired once, glazed, and fired again. If she isn’t satisfied with the outcome, she breaks the objects down and reuses them – the cycle repeats. She sees her ceramics as existing within a ‘temporal arc’ and thinks about how “presentation is just a moment in the timeline of a work.” Interested in how a glaze can render different shapes and colours, this part of Jordan’s process is all by estimation, a trial and error, fingers crossed as the artworks come out of the kiln. Jordan’s larger tile relief Stack bond, 2021, is metallic and bronzed; from afar it echoes an ornamental chess board. Closer-up you see the imprint of a textile element, a loose string weave, once malleable and free now trapped and static within the darkness of the shiny tiles. The string is differently placed in every square, sometimes tightly together and sometimes spread wonkily apart, a soft abstraction that gestures in distinctive ways.
Both artists are interested in patterns they come across in books and the outside world. Jacqueline’s patterns are often pre-existing weaving patterns, but she is also deeply motivated by the intersection of geometric shape and bold colours. Her works Twill 1, 2, 3 and Hopsack 1, 2 from 2022 are coloured pencil drawn on small wooden blocks. Roughly made, they take on the character of a children’s game, worn over time and passed through many hands. Her varied use of either “twill” or “hopsack” weaving designs show the pattern from different aspects— from higher up, further away, or in double. Thinking about how over time cultural patterns can lose meaning when their symbols are forgotten or out of context, Jacqueline questions how a once ubiquitous pattern can be rendered abstract. The design for Trileće, 2022, one of the artists’ larger weavings, originates from the Serbian style “three milk” cake, known for its feathered dual-toned decoration. To most viewers it is simply an abstraction, but for Jacqueline the textiles’ navy and honey-coloured wool warmly emulates the caramel and butter patterning, simple luxuries that melt in ones’ mouth.
Jordan often draws on details from her everyday life, such as the arrangement of tiles on a slippery floor at the swimming pool. Ever attentive to the brick patterns she sees on walks in her neighbourhood, she researches the pattern names before reconstructing them in her artworks. The brick-laying formation “Spanish bond” appears in one of her graphite drawings, meticulously drawn the geometric markings appear uniform and faultless, but their tonal shading gives them a depth closer to reality. Jacqueline’s drawings are on 1mm grid paper pulled straight from the notepad; binder rings exposed. Allowing the grid to guide her abstractions, these works on paper are evocative of a weavers’ drafting process and speak to the immediacy of drawing as a medium. Linking both artists’ drawings is the laboured pencil marks, traces of touch which remind us of the nature and poetry of the home-made.
Throughout the exhibition subtle links between the artists are everywhere in evidence, inherent to each other’s work and proving friendships’ power of osmosis. While it is an interdisciplinary exhibition, all the artworks are underpinned by common ideas – of simplicity, repetition, beauty. They draw on their shared language, intuitively built by hand both together and apart. The final two works in the exhibition are exemplary of this. Jacqueline’s playful and propulsive Colour Field Drawing, 2022 takes on a distinctly tile-like quality evocative of a bespoke mosaic table-top. Jordan’s Flat basket weave, 2022 takes its shape from a weavers’ pattern and investigates how it translates to ceramic, the bleed and bleach of the glaze creating a curious organic finish. These two works appear on the edge of the space, heading into the gallery office and beyond. Tipped on its’ side, a square becomes a diamond, signalling a further playfulness to come.




Untitled (1mm squares) (coloured drawings) 2020, coloured pencil on graph paper, 37.5 x 29 x 4 cm
Photos courtesy André Piguet and Christo Crocker.
FUTURE INHERITANCE
25.03.2021 - 28.03.2021
NGV Melbourne Design Week
Truce, Collingwood AU
https://www.instagram.com/future.inheritance/

Azbuka Rug 2021
Wool, cotton and jute
70 x 80 cm
Photo Lillie Thompson
Future Inheritance curated by Marsha Golemac
Many of us inherit objects handed down from generation to generation, some ordinary or banal, some functional, others impractical, and some rare, precious and irreplaceable. Irrespective of their properties, they all carry inherit meaning, having been deemed worthy of preservation and appreciation by us, as individuals. Future Inheritance explores the power of objects, the stories they hold and the ways in which they transfer ideas and values, from one generation to the next. If we were to leave an object behind for a loved one – what would it look like and what is the significance of that object; emotional, historical, cultural or otherwise? Curated by Marsha Golemac, the exhibition showcases the works of 20 artists, with new work commissioned for this exhibition.
~
Azbuka rug is a very personal work made reflecting upon my own mixed heritage; the widely forgotten symbols of handwoven carpets in my family’s homeland; and the 1992 slogan of Mladen Stilinović ‘An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is no Artist’.
So much of cultural understanding hinges on the practice of language, with the alphabet often the first symbols we are formally taught to recognise. While much can be lost between generations, I have chosen to create this tapestry using the same method as those in my family’s homeland – abstracted – depicting their Cyrillic alphabet as symbols to remember or forget.



Future Inheritance 2021
Exhibition Install
Truce
Photos courtesy Tomas Friml
CONCRETE FABRIC
26.11.2019 - 16.02.2020
Glass Cube Gallery, Frankston Arts Centre
27-37 Daveys Street, Frankston AU
https://www.mcclellandgallery.com/

Concrete Fabric is a satelite installation created as part of the exhibition Haus Werk: The Bauhaus in Contemporary Art at the McCLelland Sculpture Park+Gallery. Curated by Jane O'Neill with Simon Lawrie, Haus Werk forms part of the official 100jahrebauhaus program of events that celebrates the centenary of the Bauhaus in 2019. Including Australian and international contemporary artists and performers, Haus Werk affirms the relevance of methods first grounded in the Bauhaus, and explores the way these concepts have new applications across different locations and times.
Given the provisions of the unique Glass Cube at the Frankston Arts Centre I created a large-scale architectural weaving titled Concrete Fabric. This work consists of sheets of metal mesh, typically used for laying cement, covered in woven wool, which approaches the Bauhaus’ architectural principles from a weaver’s sensibilities, utilising industrial materials and maintaining an exposure of their raw qualities.


Concrete Fabric 2019
Reinforced metal mesh and wool
8 x 1.8 m
Photo Christian Capurro
BREAD + GAMES
22.08.2019 - 13.09.2019
Gallery Boot
328 Napier Street, Fitzroy AU

Grid IV 2019
Baking rack and wool
45 x 35 cm
Photo Christo Crocker

Grid V 2019
Baking rack and wool
40 x 26 cm
Photo Christo Crocker

Concrete Fabric 2019
Industrialised metal mesh and wool
4 x 1.8 m
Photo Christo Crocker
HANDHELD JUNCTURE
JORDAN MITCHELL-FLETCHER + JACQUELINE STOJANOVIC
29.06.2019 - 27.07.2019
Haydens
1/10-12 Moreland Road, Brunswick East AU
https://haydens.gallery/
Text by Katie Paine


Handheld Juncture presents new work by Jacqueline Stojanovic and Jordan Mitchell-Fletcher. Merging practices of mosaic and tapestry, this exhibition unites their shared interest in craft and histories of the handmade. Exploring a myriad of themes around femininity, the binary of art and the artisan, and the inherent hierarchy of materials.
Accompanying text written by Katie Paine.





Handheld Juncture
2019
Installation views
Photo Christo Crocker
PICTURES MADE OF WOOL
GROUP EXHIBITION CURATED BY JOHN NIXON
19.03.2019 - 23.03.2019
Studio 14 Gertrude Contemporary
21-31 High Street, Preston South AU






PIROT NOTES
19.03.2018 - 23.03.2018
The Workshop on Forster
Forsterstrasse 51, Berlin DE
https://workshop-on-forster.de/

Pirot Notes comprises a body of work encapsulating a yearlong journey made overland from Central Asia to Serbia following the historical trade route and eventual introduction of carpet making to Pirot. During this time Stojanović learnt the art of carpet making and later created this series at the Icelandic Textile Centre in Blönduós, Iceland, where she was an artist in residence during November 2017. The work raises concerns about the preservation of tradition in modern society in drawing direct reference to the artist's own ancestral link to Pirot ćilim weavers and the broader tradition of carpet making in Serbia.
An industrial town in central Serbia, Pirot was home to many weavers and as recently as 1965 over eighteen hundred women lived and weaved there. During a visit to Pirot in 2016, only fifteen women practiced the tradition of carpet making, with steady decline as rural youth continually migrate to larger cities. The carpets are remembered and celebrated by an older generation and these days uncommon to find in the contemporary homes of Belgrade. Pirot ćilims are recognised for their bold geometric patterns and distinctive bright colours, however, Stojanović aims not to replicate the designs used in traditional ćilims, but her series depicts the visual impressions left on the artist during her time spent in Serbia.
In playing with these binaries of old and new, Pirot Notes abstracts the declining practice of Pirot carpet weaving through contemporary symbolism. Given this work is made during a time in which such ćilims are displayed in the contexts of ‘the souvenir shop’ and the ‘heritage museum’, Stojanović’s work alludes to a state of laxity within modern culture itself; a culture focused on an inevitable forward motion towards certain progress and the potential mistakes of abandoning its past.



Pirot Notes
2018
Installation views
Photo Joel Boardman