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Long after the valorisation of traditional women's handicraft as art and the appropriation of petit point for conceptual purposes by artists such as Narelle Jubelin, comes another tack on the subversive stitch-sewing on a monumental scale. No longer consigned to tiny and easily concealed spaces, the 'feminine' art of sewing now looms large and imposing, the thread an old salt's pride of seaworthy rope, the needle a steel-tipped oar that's more like a spear. Joanne Lindsell combines the maritime, with its evocation of boundless space and matchless power, with the intricate and intimate craft of sewing. The effect is disorientating, not only because of the confusion of scale, but also because of the confusion of sexual stereotypes and historical epochs. The work reminds me of an old concept of sexual difference, but one whose assumptions persist.
For an installation at Selenium, Lindsell brought together a number of elements she has been rearranging and recombining in her recent work. These include a seventy-five metre length of maritime rope, worn with use; a beautifully rendered metal-tipped wooden oar; and a simulated wall, composed of a wooden grid painted undercoat-pink, covered with a peeling ultramarine plywood sheet. The grid was suspended at an angle from the ceiling, the rope threaded through its bottom perimeter, its idle remnants moored at each side by the pregnant inertia of two tightly coiled balls. The oar hung on the wall along the length of slack rope, pointing to the suspended slab as if having just finished writing a sentence, or piercing a stitch. The crafting of each element is expert, betraying Lindsell's experience as a theatrical props maker and highlighting her reverence for her materials. Indeed, theatricality