Exuberance Exhibition Catalogue

Perception of Colour
By Sharon Peoples
Colour is difficult to describe in words.
The vocabulary of colour is a
constellation, a constellation of many
adjectives. Over the last two to three
years, conversations between Carol
Cooke and myself about colour have
been surprising, and, revealing about
the complexity of colour. ‘What type of
red is scarlet?’ ‘You call that purple?’
‘Brown?’
Colour is subjective. Responses to this
visual phenomenon are often
emotional and largely based on cultural
conditioning and visual experience.
Colour stimulates the brain via the
eyes. Bringing together hand stitched
works by twenty artists highlights the
complexity of colour. The choice of
artists through social media and
publications were based on artists’
individual perception of colour and
capacity in stitch, their skills at mixing
colour, the vibrancy of works and their
conviction for conveying ideas. The
curatorial rationale added, not only the
suggestion of a wide colour palette of
strong intensity, but also the emotional
state of exuberance.
It is difficult to pinpoint what
exuberance is. Kay Redfield Jamison
writes that “Exuberance is an
abounding, ebullient, effervescent
emotion. It is kinetic and unrestrained,
joyful, irrepressible. It is not happiness,
although they share a border. It is
instead, at its core, a more restless,
billowing state.” (2004: 4)
For many participating artists in the
exhibition, Exuberance, have explored
with a child-like fearlessness as they
produce unrestrained works. Their
creativity abounds with some
preferring novelty. We have often
heard the phrase – ‘a child could do
that!’ that!’– in relation to art
movements such as Dadaism or
abstract expressionism. But in
stitching? Some artists take time
unlearning many social inhibitions,
coming to enjoy risk-taking in their
work. They become intoxicated by
finding something that no-one else
has seen or found before and they
grow to relish fearlessness in their
artwork.
When we listen to jazz music, we can
hear risk-taking in improvisation,
reflecting their individuality, ability, and
style. Similarly, stitching exuberantly,
enhanced by colourful threads seems
to lead to an expressive flow,
producing unique works.
Linking up with Carol Cooke in the first
few months added the dimension of
producing a book on the project. This
incentivised many artists to continue.
Although the exhibition and the book
were two different endeavours, they
were nonetheless symbiotic.
Why stitch? Working with threads,
rather than paint or even glass
whereby the liquidity of colour can
morph into variations of hues, values
and saturation; with thread, colour is
less mobile and requires optical mixing.
Each thread of colour retains its own
presence. It is tempered by the
relationship to surrounding colours and
the textures created by the chosen
stitch. The eye works at blending. It is
not only the thread but the base on
which it sits that adds to the equation.
Experience of teaching the use of
colour wheels had left the question of
why textiles artists are taught colour
through paint rather than through their
own medium: thread. Painting a colour
wheel in one sense is relatively easy:
colours can be squeezed directly from
a tube or mixed up on a palette.
Colours can be made to blend or run
into each other, tones lightened or
darkened, water reducing intensity.
With thread, the medium is not so
malleable. The eye must do the colour
mixing. Sampling and experimenting is
necessary to work towards the desired
colour outcomes. However, most
stitchers rely on the colours produced
by manufacturers.
One quest in the Exuberance project
was for textile artists to mix their own
yarns or fabrics for colour wheels. The
colour wheel is a tool and making such
a tool from the media to be used has
for me, as an artist, has led to
expressing my colour desires through
play by layering threads, stitching over
and over to till arriving at the results
pursued.
In 2021, as we moved through climate
disasters to the pandemic, the original
concept of this exhibition, Exuberance,
was to explore exuberance through
colour and how colour is expressed in
contemporary hand-stitched artworks.
Originally it was the concerns over the
destruction of nature by political and
corporate interests that refute/dismiss
the delicate interconnectedness of
nature and the environment, that were
difficult to ignore at that point in time.
The catastrophic bushfires of the
summer of 2019/20 left their mark on
Australian people, on the environment,
on the economy, the politics of our
country and art.
The day before New Year’s Eve 2019,
driving along south coast of New
South Wales, I watched a pair of
wedge tail eagles panicking in the
heavy bushfire smoke. Turning right on
to the last road open to Brown
Mountain, on passing police cars I