It is a scorching November day as I dash across Z Block. I feel nostalgia for this time of year: the stickiness of summer days are on the horizon as one year rolls into the next; bittersweet endings and the electricity of new beginnings crackle in the air like the approach of an afternoon storm. And, with the end of the year comes graduation season, which brings me to the cool relief of Lattice: Queensland University of Technology’s 2024 Visual Arts Graduate Exhibition. The precinct’s artist studios have been stripped of their furnishings and reinvigorated as a pop-up gallery for the week. Struck by the diverse and innovative array of media, I experience a moment of dismay that I am unable to write on all of the works by this year’s graduating cohort.
The exhibition has a strong representation of works with performance or interactive components, and I was drawn to one such work by Doris Tim Ligon. In Bliss and Bless (2024), a white hand protrudes from the wall, wreathed in flowers. Beneath it, a neat, rectangular path of white rice extends into the exhibition space. The installation is surrounded by cardboard effigies of people and pets. In this work, Ligon creates a simulacra of the Filipino ritualistic Mano po gesture. The artist instructs participants to remove their shoes and walk the rice pathway to receive a blessing: first touching their fingers gently to those of the outstretched hand, before bowing and pressing their forehead to its fingers. Through this gesture, Ligon creates a tactile portal that resolves the distance between here and home, against the fear of losing oneself in the divide marked by her experience as part of the Filipino diaspora.
Dr Daniel McKewen, Senior Lecturer of Visual Arts at QUT reflects upon how the exhibition title, ‘Lattice:’ “suggesting [an] interlaced structure of a woven fabric,” is particularly well suited to the predominance of textile works in the exhibition. Many of these subvert the traditionally feminine textile arts in both documenting and challenging perceptions of the female experience. Lani Palmer’s installation, STITCH RAGE (2024) is an arresting piece that masks anger beneath a veneer of playful humour. Palmer’s installation includes a quilted, ruffled tuft that makes a “MOUNTAIN OUT OF A MOLEHILL.” Behind this is a pair of patchwork “BOSSY BOOTS” and across the wall spans a fragmented and haphazard banner that reads “ALL OVER THE PLACE.” Palmer disarms the viewer with the soft connotation of domestic arts, and produces a jarring contradiction through the use of harsh words that minimise the female experience. The solemn and powerful resonance of Chloe Burr’s Wear and Tear (2024) was not lost on me as we mark 85 women in Australia lost to violence this year. Burr’s quilt maps the terrain of Brisbane’s streets in pinks and purples, florals and lace. But this delicate landscape is embroidered with unsettling headlines: “Australian women living in fear and violence due to street harassment,” “Girl followed twice in two days.” In these works, Palmer and Burr offer a stark contradiction between the comfort and familiarity of their work’s media and the harsh realities espoused by their textual overlays.
I was also drawn to Reserve (2024) by Niamh McDonald, which offers a novel and scientific approach to the material practice of weaving. An aluminium frame drips with interlaced and tendrilous cords that trail and curl beneath it, made from extruded agar-based bioplastics. The strands weave a motley, earth-toned lattice, taking their colours from clay, blue quandong, gum leaves, lomandra hystrix, and weeping grass sourced from the Banks St Reserve. Reserve embodies an algorithmic quality, as McDonald transposes scientific data collected from her local parkland into a binary code, to both create the pattern for her weaving, and document the health of the waterway. The intersections between warp and weft create nodes mapping the results of water quality, soil field testing, and biodiversity observations. The industrial and organic are inextricable in this work, proferring hope that as ecosystems come under threat, the meeting of technology and art will find novel ways to document and restore them.
Leaving the exhibition, my attention is drawn to one final work. A large, white board covered with metal hooks asks viewers in large black letters to “take a day of my life.” There are 270 hooks, and from many hang a coloured acrylic keyring, reminiscent of hotel keyrings, although by the time of my visit many have already been removed. Each keyring is engraved with a memory recalled by the artist, Emily Chiplin, for each day of the year so far. In This Thing Happened on this Day (2024), Chiplin engages in a relational process of storytelling, memory keeping, and the eventual act of forgetting. I hold a keyring in my hand, poised to remove it from the hook, but tempered by a sense of being responsible for a day of someone’s life, I let it slip from my fingers to remain a little longer.
Lattice offers a space for the diverse artistic forms of this year’s cohort to interweave. While each work is distinct in its materiality and messages, there are points where the threads criss-cross and find each other, and at other points, diverge. In these works, the artists’ individual attentiveness to issues personal, social, ecological, cultural, become a part of a vibrant and continuing tapestry.
Expanded Lemonade coverage of 2024 graduate exhibitions is kindly made possible by Lemonade’s Patreons and Charmaine Lyons. Lemonade is continuing to fundraise for four further reviews. Become a Patreon or contact editor@lemonadeletters.com.au to make a one-off contribution and support this unique coverage of Queensland’s emerging artists.
Felicity Andrews is an emerging arts worker who writes, researches, and creates on Yugerra/Turrbal Land, Meanjin. She holds a Masters of Museum Studies from the University of Queensland, and currently works as a cultural mediator and public programming intern at the University of Queensland Art Museum.
