Wangaratta Art Gallery
16 November 2024 - 16 February 2025
In 2023, Britt Salt, artist and final year Master of Fine Art student at the Victoria College of Arts was paired with VCA alumna, artist Hannah Gartside. So began a friendship over a cup of tea, and a conceptual interrogation of practice. While differing in their material outcomes and thematic explorations, both artists celebrate the medium of textiles and extend the practice through a play with space, movement, intimacy, curiosity and interaction with the body.
Counterparts: Expanded Textile Practices features new work by both artists in conversation, alongside formative work held in the Wangaratta Art Gallery Collection and the extension of previous bodies of work. Using these earlier ideas as a foreground to later practice, large scale textile installations transform the gallery space, and trace the development of each artist’s practice, their similarities and deviations and their shared influence.
Image: Britt Salt, Living Grid III (Installation view), 2024.
Photo: Jeremy Weihrauch
Britt Salt, Living Grid III (Installation view), 2024.
Photo: Jeremy Weihrauch
Britt Salt, Living Grid III (Installation view), 2024.
Photo: Jeremy Weihrauch
Britt Salt, Turning the Grid III (Detail), 2024, cotton warp thread, dimensions variable.
Turning the Grid III is a spatial installation, or drawing in space, that comprises warp thread usually used for creating the foundation of a tapestry. The work responds to the unique timber ceiling of the Wangaratta Art Gallery, originally a Presbyterian church built in 1898. The repetitive vertical and horizontal timber stripes of the ceiling are broken up by a grid of tessellating shapes. These shapes embody the nature of a grid - they control the perceived movement and orientation of the striped ceiling pattern.
Working site-specifically for this exhibition, Salt has considered the spatial context and adapted an existing work Living Grid III into a new iteration - modifying and attuning it to the interior architectural features and structural elements of the gallery space, including the position of walls and oddities such as the former up-light structures.
In two areas of the gallery, banks of warp threads mirror the dimensions of the ceiling stripes, winding their way around lighting tracks and walls, and intersecting in space as they trace out alternative possibilities for how these architectural features can relate to each other. The black cotton warp threads Salt uses are visually subtle and may only become apparent when the viewer is very close to them or moving in the space, activating a visual moiré, or wavy, pattern between the threads.
To avoid colliding with the threads and access certain space of the installation, the viewer must move to the edges of the gallery.In forcing this divergence from the usual paths of navigation within the gallery space, Salt shifts the grid, offering the viewer differing viewpoints and the potential to unearth new variations of the experience within the built structure.
By taking the warp thread away from the context of a tapestry and into the spatial environment, Salt has created a grid in a state of ‘becoming’, living or turning. As she describes:
“Turning is a term that describes the reorienting, shifting and sometimes unstable nature of these works as well as the attention of the viewer and their movement through the installation. To turn to something is to shift ones focus onto it, to tune in. By using the method of turning I seek to tune in to the built environments I encounter and humanise the grid, showing it to be constantly evolving, prone to slippage and existing in the present.”
Britt Salt, Living Grid III (Installation view), 2024.
Photo: Jeremy Weihrauch
Britt Salt, Living Grid III (Installation view), 2024.
Photo: Jeremy Weihrauch
Britt Salt, Grid II, 2023, wool and cotton, 97 x 91cm.
The grid is a structure synonymous with order in the built environment – a framework that spans human history yet is often associated as a mechanism for control, and colonisation. With the grid still prevalent and powerful across many levels of society today, Grid II explores this structure as one of potential rather than pure control, a possibility that is open to transformation.
This work is one of an ongoing series of tapestries that explore the form of the grid structure and its potential for divergence from control. Grid II comprises a ground of undulating undyed and wheat-coloured yarn interrupted by fifteen black horizontal bands. Atop this woven ground are ten vertical threads anchored to the top and bottom woven edges. These threads are part of the vertical warp; the usually hidden foundation onto which the weft is woven to construct the tapestry.
By shifting these foundational threads to the surface of the work a visual and visible grid is created, intersecting with the woven horizontal bands. In the act of revealing something which is usually hidden, the grid becomes an in-between space of radical possibility. As Salt describes:
“site-specificity and labour-intensive process are methods … that I employ to unearth critical and artistic potentialities from seemingly constrained built structures.”
Britt Salt, Turning the Grid III (Detail), 2024, cotton warp thread, dimensions variable.
Britt Salt, Divergence V, 2024, plywood and black stain, 95 x 47.5 x 25cm (edition of 8).
Divergence IV and V occupy a space between furniture and sculpture. Made from marine plywood, the “marble of modernity” as artist Nick Selenitsch calls it, their height is that of a standard bench seat with room for two people to sit. However, the curved base of each work means they easily tip and rock from side to side when touched, making seating precarious and unstable.
The inherent instability of the ‘seats’ disrupts the promise of rest or support that an environment can offer to its human participants and the commonly associated understanding of what a seat implies is disturbed. Each object invites one to sit but in order to do so with safety, one must find balance and equilibrium – unlike a typical seating experience. Likewise, when two people attempt to sit on a form together, they must do so in sync, finding balance and reciprocal support from each other’s body.
Extending Salt’s interest in spatial relationships evident in the designs for her two-dimensional tapestry works, Divergence IV and V bring immediate attention to our bodies, our relationship to our environment and the supports we take for granted.
Counterparts (Installation view), 2024.
Hannah Gartside, The Sleepover, 2018-19, worn nighties and slips c.1965-1980, found synthetic fabric and cotton ribbon, millinery wire, thread (made with assistance from Monika Holgar, Louise Meuwissen, Melanie Ward and Kate Woodcroft), 670 x 280 x 210cm.
Hannah Gartside, Fantasies (Installation view), 2024.
Hannah Gartside, The Sleepover, 2018-19, worn nighties and slips c.1965-1980, found synthetic fabric and cotton ribbon, millinery wire, thread (made with assistance from Monika Holgar, Louise Meuwissen, Melanie Ward and Kate Woodcroft), 670 x 280 x 210cm.
Hannah Gartside, Fantasies (Installation view), 2024.
Hannah Gartside, Ascension III, 2024, worn nighties c.1965-1980, thread, cane, silver-plated metal chain and fixtures, dimensions variable.
Creation Station as part of Counterparts: Expanded Textile Practices | Hannah Gartside and Britt Salt.
Creation Station (Detail) as part of Counterparts: Expanded Textile Practices | Hannah Gartside and Britt Salt.