Picture yourself rummaging through the sale haberdashery section, or digging through fabric offcuts in your local op shop. Picture your kooky friend's childhood bedroom. Picture the weaving shapes and colours of the queer club bathroom exploding around you.

This group show investigates textiles and soft sculpture as objects evocative of, and imbued with play, sensuality and care. Embedded within these tactile, textural objects and their slow creation, is an innate intimacy and comfort owing to their closeness to the body and their kinship with well-worn childhood stuffed toys or blankets.

Textile arts—historically denigrated as ‘low art’, ‘women’s crafts’, or marginalised as mere labour—have been used in queer artforms to navigate and investigate social boundaries. Here, the uncanny valley of sexual and sensual (and ridiculous, over the top, flamboyant et cetera) queer aesthetics overlaid with youthful nostalgia challenges the hierarchy of the traditionally male, individualistic, ‘professional’ white box gallery. Textile arts come with metaphor innately woven into their fabric as literal connective methods and motions that bind and bring together. Meanwhile the works themselves, created in collaboration and conversation joyfully and foolishly interact, connect, and intermingle, in an ode to strongly interconnected communities.

You are invited into our intimate, sensory space, to touch and feel, play and be. Go on, have a giggle. We dare you! ;) 

This exhibition evolved and its overall concept changed with each painting I created. I despise the fact that I have to sum the process up within a paragraph. But if I have to…….

Auras is an exploration of the different ideas of femininity created by society. Most of the pieces are homages to stereotypes society inflicts on women. This series of surrealist watercolour portraits present stereotypical concepts of femininity such as, being feminine is having long hair, women should smile more, women should dress ‘femininely’. 

The one outlier in the series is Sarah, a moment captured mid conversation that I’m sure many of you will invent your own version of what it implies and what she was thinking at the time. Historically, women in art were rarely presented with anything other than a serene expression on their faces and I see no point in continuing with presenting the same idea of what women feel, think and are. 

Tash Jackson is a Melbourne/ Naarm based watercolour artist. Romanticising the world surrounding her is essential to how she experiences and views it. Using predominantly watercolour on paper, Jackson presents her inner romantic views of society, familial relationships and femininity. 

The process of breaking down and dissecting an image allows her to take her time immersing herself in the process of creating a symbolic image. Jackson creates intimacy by spending time with her works. Her compulsion to allow the work to develop at its own pace results in the daydreamed perspective that she conjures up in her mind. She uses imagery that is surrealist, symbolic and figurative in nature, bright and unrealistic in colour to present her romanticised perspective. 

Jackson is currently exploring different avenues of creating large scale paper works. She does this by using multiple panels in a jigsaw formation that seamlessly fit together. This method is complementary to her process of dissecting an image into elements, which is essential to her development of a piece. 

While exploring this avenue of creating large scale works, Jackson was fortunate to be nominated as a finalist for the Biennial Flow Watercolour Artist Prize 2023.