Monuments and Lucky Sticks
NGV Melbourne Design Fair 2023, presented by Craft
For NGV Design Fair 2023 Pattle presents a new series of highly-crafted hand-woven objects which build upon her previous years' Amphorae works in an ongoing fascination with material culture.
Weaving with contemporary textiles of stretch velvet and synthetic taffeta, Pattle recreates megalithic stone and divination rods; both objects which sit at a meeting point between human culture and the natural world. Pattle's densely woven Monuments are tributes to France's alignements de Carnac, a large Neolithic site comprised of more than 3000 roughly hewn stones positioned in meandering columns to form a porous symbolic border between land and sea.
While divination rods are purported to channel the attraction between different substances, Pattle's Lucky Sticks realises the fated intimate embrace of two materials, in this case, wood and glass. Using a eucalyptus branch foraged in Naarm's inner north following close contact with a reversing car (not hers), Pattle handweaves Japanese beads to completely encapsulate the wood in glass embellishment.
In Pattle's hands, both stick and stone are re-worked and embellished as objects of ritual and exchange.
