HANNAH GARTSIDE

We don’t just see Hannah Gartside’s (b. 1987) artworks—we encounter their presence as the familiar materiality of vintage and discarded textiles evokes emotion, memory and the feel of fabric against skin.  Fashioned into spirited sculptures and kinetic installations, they arouse a visceral response; we want to touch the work as simultaneously it moves us to smile in recognition, burn with curiosity, or quiver with desire.  

Taught by her grandmother Peggy to sew at age 7, Gartside has been cutting, stitching, felting and quilting ever since.  Living and working on Wurundjeri Woiwurrung/Boonwurrung Country, Naarm (Melbourne), with an ethos of rescuing, reusing, and repurposing, her raw materials are sourced from found or gifted clothing, fabric and ephemera.  Transforming them into art is an act of respect—honouring the fabrics’ vitality, sentience and connection to bodies and lives one will never know.

Gartside’s intuitive understanding of stagecraft and the care and precision with which two-dimensional fabrics are constructed into three-dimensional stories has been honed by over a decade of intensive pattern-making for her BFA (Fashion Design) Honours from Queensland University of Technology, followed by costume-making and stage-dressing for theatre and the Queensland Ballet.  Undertaking a BFA (Sculpture) Honours from Victorian College of the Arts encouraged the development of larger-scale, immersive installations, amplifying the art historical and feminist underpinning of her practice.

Works from this period unpick notions of femininity and pleasures of the flesh.  In New Terrain (2016), stiff pink petticoat lace trim and garter-belt clips become a hovering curtain of pouting bullet-bra cones.  Nylon nighties, petticoats and slips from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, suggest scenarios from the secret interior lives of the women who’ve worn them in the iterative installations of Fantasies (2018 - ongoing). Some ascend to the heaven—their permanent pleats sliced-open in joyous release from social strictures; while nearby The Sleepover (2018) allows us to wander underneath—and be seductively stroked by—the soft fringes of a pastel sea of shredded slips.

While savouring the quiet solitude of stitching, Gartside also relished researching to produce her kinetic installation Loie, Artemisia, Pixie, Sarah, Lilith (2021).  This extraordinary femmage honouring the strength and talent of five women forebears was commissioned for Primavera 2021 at the Museum of Contemporary Art.  Luscious velvets, silks, and satins—sewn onto suspended spinning steel armatures—metamorphosise into painter, actor, dancer, spiritualist and the demonic female.  Whirling, fluttering and twisting in hypnotic autonomous software-controlled sequences, these fabrications exude a radiant sovereignty.

Seemingly ready to embrace us, the elegant sequined soft wall sculptures of This Body Is Experiencing Pleasure (2023), convey connection, love and liberation.  Contextualising the artworks, an accompanying short story—Frances, the moth—concludes with the heroine cutting out and donning a moth cloak, transforming into a shimmering creature and flying away.  Nothing could better impart Gartside’s joy of dissecting cast-off fabric to magically reanimate matter.

With consideration for the agency of her materials and a commitment to anti-consumerism, she is drawn to the strong theoretical and philosophical agenda of an MFA at Amsterdam’s Sandberg Instituut.  Here, the Dirty Art Department invites multi-disciplinarians to become active agents in the creation of our planet’s future.  Already a mistress in the expression of sensation, within a stimulating milieu her formidable practice will further unfold.  Hannah Gartside is poised to soar.

Essay written by Melinda Rackham, September 2024. 

Melinda Rackham writes on art, artists, feminisms and adoption.  An Adjunct Research Professor at UniSA Creative, her latest book CoUNTess: Spoiling Illusions since 2008 (2023) was co-authored with Elvis Richardson.  Rackham lives and works in Tarntanya/Adelaide.