CANBERRA.- ReCoil: Change and Exchange in Coiled Fibre Art explores the influences underpinning changes to contemporary Indigenous fibre art happening in many parts of Australia.

In highlighting the rich legacy of inter-cultural exchange behind the coiling movement, ReCoil: Change and Exchange in Coiled Fibre Art profiles the work of twelve Indigenous artists and three non-Indigenous textile artists who have worked together.

Organised by Artback NT: Arts Development and Touring, the exhibition features a wide range of conventional baskets to quirky, two and three dimensional, innovative sculptures, including a smaller version of the Grass Toyota that won the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art award in 2005.

ReCoil explores coiled basketry technique and the way it has spread and diversified, establishing new fibre movements in a range of remote Aboriginal communities. This basketry technique was traditionally practiced by Aboriginal people of south-east Australia, and was transplanted by missionaries many years ago to Arnhem Land.

More recently, coiled basketry technique was introduced via workshops to the women of the desert regions of the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia. The movement has continued to spread rapidly along lines of kinship and via skills exchanges, and is now practiced throughout the remote regions of the Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia. As the weavers travel, the influence of coiling keeps expanding.

ReCoil: Change and Exchange in Coiled Fibre Art will be on display at the National Museum of Australia through June 14, 2009 before travelling to the Caloundra Regional Gallery and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

2. Nature of the Landscape
This second section seeks to offer a “breathing space” where the links between landscape and the lived environment are addressed.

The evocation of landscapes is fundamental to the two-sided reflections undertaken by this exhibition. In effect they provide a tangible framework for the playing out of everyday lives; and the ways in which landscapes are portrayed by artists converts them into a territory for spiritual exploration, an escape route from the day-to-day, conducive to “strolling” and even to evasion (as in Rondinone) or to simple spiritual visions (Lugo Guadarrama, Tamayo, Crewdson).

Such representations will serve as testimonies to the nature of the (more or less) immediate world as well as to social transformations and profound changes relating to technological progress (Carlos Rivera, Sarah Morris, Tina Modoti), or to imagining possible uses (Pablo Vargas Lugo ).

Therefore, landscape will not be considered here as the mere description of what is perceived by the retina, but rather as a cultural construct, an element belonging to a metaphorical language that goes beyond visual appearances, to some other place.

3. Identitarian Strategies
In this section, Inventing and living in the everyday world also requires an affirmation of being and the definition of identity. Highly political, identity strategies and representations are fundamental to the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican art, and on occasion include a nationalistic dimension that impels artists to document, and indeed aggrandize, certain scenes from everyday life. On a parallel path, contemporary practice abounds in identity references, above all in the United States, where numerous artists such as Dan Graham and Paul McCarty pose questions regarding the specific criteria that constitute “Americanness”.

Identity construction also becomes important in the definition of specific individuals, particularly in portraiture like the ones created by Ramón Cano Manila, Hermegildo Bustos, Rineke Dijkstra and Dieter Roth.

4. Resistance and Anti-discipline
This last section is the one most closely related to the thesis espoused in Michel de Certeau’s writing, above all when its author studies how culturally-defined uses are modified—without their being rejected.

In addition to celebrating a marked irreverence toward the political and to often assuming a posture of protest, which can at times take the form of caricature (Posada, Baños Rocher), non-discipline manifests itself by eschewing codes of conduct. Thus it tends to create “pockets” or strategies of resistance to established norms and to already codified behaviors. It does so by inventing alternative ways of being, alternative gestures and alternative visual signs. We also emphasize dislocation procedures regarding object-use itself.