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| detail Desert Tryptich |
Felicity Griffin Clark is a textile artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Felicity uses silk, wool, alpaca and linen, mulberry bark, synthetics, paper,
metals and found objects to convey colours, textures and meanings in unconventional ways. She has exhibited her work in Australia and overseas and won the inaugural Buda Textile Award in 2008.
Felicity was featured in the July 2013 edition of Down Under Textiles and has work featured in New York artist Seth Apter’s latest book “The Mixed-Media Artist: Art Tips, Tricks, Secrets and Dreams From Over 40 Amazing Artists”.
Felicity worked for more than 20 years as a social policy analyst and researcher, specialising in Aboriginal policy.
She is a currently graduate student at the University of Melbourne: her research interests include mediaeval and early modern funerary rituals and textiles for babies and children, and maps as cultural artefacts.
DESERT TRIPTYCH
A burnt quilt made of eucalyptus dyed blanket,
cotton, satin, synthetics
89 cm w x 127 cm h
2010
I have been haunted by the landscape of central Australia since my first visit there in 2007. There is a compelling mystique about the country around Alice Springs and into the desert - I feel drawn, mesmerised by the rocks and red dust - I want to sink into it and lose myself in its red antiquity.
I long to take off into the desert and feel annihilated by the space, clear air and luminosity. I begin to understand the desert fathers. I think you could spend your life wandering, yearning, searching for the spirit of this place.
Although I am a whitefella, I can feel that there is another way of reading this landscape but it is out of my reach. Whitefella maps and language and way of understanding the world are pitifully insufficient to grasp the spirituality of this landscape that quivers massively, just out of our reach.
Like an unlettered animal we can intuit a skeleton of meaning and realise that there is a body of symbolism and that the earth is alive in a completely different way, but it is not ours. And I think this leaves the whitefella with a profound grief - so profound that he cannot grasp this either and is left bemused and pained by something he can't understand.
The red earth, the convulsed rocks reach out, yearning for connection. The whitefella can dimly feel and reflect the yearning but cannot work out how to connect, how to be with the earth and is condemned to bereftness.
The desire for connection with the landscape has followed me back to the city. I am haunted by its low vibration – not a sound but something like a frequency just out of range. I'm sure that this is because it is not my country. And yet it affects me like a deep continuous yearning – I want to go back and just sit and listen
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| detail Desert Tryptich |
XYLEM PHLOEM: THE INTERIOR LANDSCAPE OF TREES
Wool, synthetics, silk, cotton, tulle, oilsticks, ink, layered, stitched & burnt
30 cm w x 140 cm h
2014
Xylem Phloem: the interior landscape of trees reflects inner structures
and colours of trees as seen through microscope.
Greens, blues, reds, bronzes: an intricate balanced system
of tubes, pores and valves transport sugars, water
and oxygen - the tree's life blooda living landscape.
Techniques
and materials
Wool,
hand-dyed cotton, silk and synthetic fabrics; silk and rayon thread;
sequins, plastic. Oil paintsticks. Chopped up synthetic fabrics, sequins
and bits of plastic placemat were layered
over a base of wool and then cotton wholecloth, covered in tulle and stitched, then burnt back with a
heat gun. Colours and lines were enhanced with oil paintsticks.
JEALOUSY
Damaged hand-dyed wholecloth, layered with synthetics, silks, cotton & tulle - stiched slashed and burnt
120 cm h x 95 cm w
2010
Inspired by betrayal and deceit – this piece was painful and cathartic to make.
The sour greens and yellows of jealousy are slashed by bitter puce and the crimson passion of uncontrolled emotion. Lines from William Blake’s poem A Poison Tree are written/hidden throughout the work.
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