Five Walls Projects Space
6 June - 5 July 2025
Me and the girls don’t want to be boxed takes its name from a song by Melbourne punk band Amyl and the Sniffers. To be “boxed” is to be concealed, categorised, or controlled by a structure. For this exhibition, Britt Salt and Shannon Slee explore frameworks that, unlike a box, have the ability to bend. Frameworks such as time, consciousness and abstraction can become warped in processes based in textile design and craft, particularly weaving. Woven textiles are simultaneously a formal construction of interconnecting vertical and horizontal threads, as well as a flexible material that yields to gravity and the surfaces they come into contact with. The pliable yet structured nature of weaving makes it the perfect conduit for exploring how frameworks that order our experience of the world, can diverge from the expected and even lead us into the unknown.
Slee’s suite of new woven works push against the established boundaries of craft technologies to consider the intangible and the abstract. In the fleeting moments between being awake and sleeping, when dreams linger, consciousness softens, and impressions of simple geometric forms appear to the artist. In the morning, she sets out to replicate these shapes at her vintage floor loom. A labour-intensive weaving process where time stretches, and the abstract shapes begin to skew. Distorting from the crisp impression that first appeared behind Slee’s eyelids, they become intangible in the daylight.
Salt’s minimal artworks are an expression of obsessive-compulsive frameworks the artist imposes on herself in daily life. Through the lens of weaving, she seeks ways to diverge from rigid control by creating imagined architectures and scenarios in her making process where human slippage is inevitable. Lines of ink and thread are repetitively measured on paper, intertwined as tapestry or pulled taut in space. Salt’s body begins to tire over long periods of time repeating these actions. Her focus might shift momentarily, prompting a variation in movement or a wobbly line to unexpectedly materialise. These deviations are markers of a new kind of order, beyond control.
Like many textile artists, Salt and Slee mediate numerous creative fields, defying strict categorisation. Their works might hang on a wall, like a painting, intersect space like a room divider, or stretch overhead like a pitched roof. Art critic Briony Fer suggests that the ability of textiles to slide between such different orientations is a demonstration of their pliability and the many ways that art penetrates everyday life.[1] As Salt and Slee’s works in this exhibition press up against the temporal, psychological and abstract frameworks of their daily experiences, textile thinking moves with them. A malleable approach to the world that facilitates evolution beyond perceived limitations and structures, into abstract worlds of possibility.
Written by Britt Salt, 2025.
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[1] Briony Fer. “Textile Thinking” in Woven Histories; Textiles and Modern Abstraction, ed. Lynne Cooke, (Washington, Chicago, National Gallery of Art ; The University of Chicago Press, 2023), P184.