For the past five years, the Design Canberra Festival have commissioned a local contemporary craftsperson or designer to create a signature work which is featured in a Craft ACT exhibition and defines the look and feel of the festival’s visual communications.

Lucy Irvine, Canberra-based artist and Lecturer in Textiles at the ANU School of Art & Design has been selected as the 2021 designer-in-residence. Lucy Irvine’s work transforms the traditional craft practice of weaving into sculptural installations. She 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.

Since arriving in Australia in 2003, Lucy has established herself as an artist and educator who interconnects craft and art genres. Lucy’s large-scale installations repurpose utilitarian materials that make up the unseen yet integral fabric of our lives, such as expansion joint foam, paper fasteners, nylon cord and cable ties. She then transforms our experience of these materials through processes of weaving. Following her acclaimed public artwork ‘Surface Strategies’ commissioned for DESIGN Canberra at the Canberra Airport in 2017, Lucy Irvine continues to be involved in the festival and its celebration of design.

To find out more, read the designer-in-residence catalogue including an essay by Dr Robyn Creagh, Senior Lecturer in Architecture at University of Notre Dame Australia, artist reflections, and a visual journey of the designer-in-residence program.

Text courtesy designcanberrafestival.com.au