MAPPING TERRITORIES OF THE SELF
She beat the dirt out against a smooth rock, then soaked the bruised cloth in the water, shook it out and let it float.’1 This is how author Lloyd Jones describes a woman from Bougainville washing her family’s clothing in a hill stream. In northern Laos if you board a small motor vessel to traverse the Mekong River you will see plantations of crops climbing down to its edges while village people wash themselves in the powerful currents wearing sarongs. When they emerge, the fabric clings to their bodies in intimate, irregular scallop patterns.
This reflection on daily rituals, carried out almost instinctively, is by way of introducing the most recent work of Queensland artist Judith Kentish. Her mappa project which has concerned the artist chiefly since 2006 comprises two inter-dependent groups of work. The first (mappa I) was staged as an exhibition of Lambda prints at Unplace in Newstead, Brisbane, during July 2007, with the second opening the following month at The University of Queensland Art Museum. Here six large ‘cloth drawings’ were pinned to the wall and titled parchment, numbers 1 - 6. There was also a DVD merge, which slowly dissolved details scanned from the Lambda images, themselves based on the cloth pieces. Each component of this two-site project mirrored and reflected back on itself through different media.
To make the parchment works for mappa II, Kentish took lengths of cotton voile which she dyed using natural materials found in bushland surrounding her home: eucalyptus, silky oak leaves and silver wattle flowers.2 These were steeped into the fabric, in an intentionally uncontrolled fashion, over weeks. After brewing, the fine cotton was pinned... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline