Raquel Ormella
The small embroideries that open Raquel Ormella’s twenty year survey might seem like a quiet introduction to a practice known for grand, glittering banners and deconstructed Australian flags. Each one is not much bigger than a hand, with tiny stitches that build into fields of colour and fragments of text. They jut from the wall in perspex cases that show the knots and workings on the back. Ormella has always made a point of showing how she does things: the construction is part of the point. Or, maybe, the construction makes the point.
This new body of work, called All these small intensities (2017–18), is a compelling and surprising starting point for the survey—not least because Ormella began them after Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) started planning this major exhibition, which tours five more museums over the next two years. This inclusion says something about the trust of curators Rebecca Coates and Anna Briers, and their willingness to allow new conversations to develop. And this is perhaps the reason why the survey is so worthwhile: the spaces it allows for connections to develop between what can appear to be very different mediums and concerns.
After the embroideries, the survey moves onto a room of Ormella’s drawing. Two pen on paper works reproduce newspaper coverage of environmental campaigning in the early 2000s. Then there are her drawings on whiteboards, a once cutting-edge technology that is now obsolete. The boards face each other as though in a team meeting, with a pile of print-outs curling on the floor beneath them. Ormella has said the drawings have held up well in the decade since she made the work, though the same cannot be said