My lovely Italian friend, Antonia Sorsoli, once invited me to enter an event titled Surrealism. I chose to revisit a painting by Salvador Dali: two fragments of woven tapestry, panels of buttons, all surrounded by gold wire, ecclesiastical braid. It won a prize.
For a 2015 event, a group show, More Love Hours, curated by Suzette Warne, at the Ian Potter Museum, the University of Melbourne, I was encouraged to create a work. I used the image of a bronze sculpture of Apollo, dredged in his fishing net by a Palestinian off the coast of Gaza. I was struck by its monumentally lying on the floor of the fisherman’s cottage, on a baby quilt with Smurf motifs. The Apollo was created with buttons, but it was surrounded with three Smurf panels of woven tapestry. Was I deciding on a hierarchy of forms here?
A week ago, I remembered a small panel of woven tapestry, very finely woven, in the style of Paul Klee, intersecting shapes. I decided to create a border. For this I found a bundle of thin brass washers, the size of a five cent coin, heavily coated in industrial grease. The recipe for cleaning them used baking soda, salt and vinegar. Amazing the potency of kitchen ingredients. For some time I had also experimented with electrical cable. The thicker one had a more rigid core of three wires; another had twenty thin wires and therefore more flexible. The colour palette was an invitation. I had been wrapping, weaving and knotting these multicoloured wires around a variety of wire shapes. Perhaps their unpredictable chaos was jading.
I found myself yearning for a more disciplined medium to accompany my as yet unframed pieces of woven tapestry.
A textile colleague described my borders as whimsy. And so they are. Like the dialogue in Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times, fact and fancy are considered inimical. Whimsy, hopefully, is the light-bloodness of a Gemini. An Egyptian lady once described me thus. Hopefully, what has transpired here is that the colour in a part of the tapestry is echoed by a nearby washer.
anton veenstra making tapestry & objects 