The Stills

Canberra-based artist and educator Lucy Irvine has been selected as the 2021/22 designer-in-residence. Lucy Irvine’s work transforms the traditional craft practice of weaving into sculptural installations. Lucy repurposes mundane, utilitarian materials like expansion joint foam, paper fasteners and cable ties and transforms them into beautiful and acclaimed public artwork.

In creating ‘The Stills’, Irvine has revisited two small sections of weaving, cast them in bronze, then used repetition and pattern forming to show the iterative process of transformation. The artist explains: “Our appreciation of transformation can too easily rely upon a definitive before and after. What if transformation could also be an ongoing process without a beginning or an end, existing in a million small interrelations that are, for example, happening long before the materials are in hand and long after the work is on the wall?” Irvine describes her new work as a “woven cinema”, capturing transformation in stop motion: frame by frame we see change as reassuringly measurable.