Responding to the 2024 Indian Ocean Craft Triennial (IOTA24) theme “Codes in Parallel”, ‘The Pool’ draws from Buswell’s ongoing interest in representations of women's labour and fraught sociopolitical tensions. Across two large scale knitted tapestries, Buswell draws from art history, Greek mythology and personal anecdote as storytelling devices to construct an allegory that navigates contemporary anxieties on precarity and risk.
","footnotes":"Photography: Sharon Baker
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Buswell has run a variety of artist-run spaces across Perth and Fremantle and exhibited and curated exhibitions across Australia. Currently the Fremantle Arts Centre Exhibition and Engagement Coordinator, Buswell was resident at Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy in 2011 and participated in the 2015 Australia Council for the Arts Venice Biennale professional development program. In 2020, Buswell’s work was the focus of a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and in 2021 she was an exhibiting artist as part of Perth Festival and Love in Bright Landscapes curated by Annika Kristensen at ACCA. She is the 2022 TILT artist at Goolagatup Heathcote.
","heading":null,"embed":null,"video":null,"audio":null,"image":null},{"type":"image","id":"c43568f6-80e4-4349-9ca0-6e219b0970bd","text":null,"heading":null,"embed":null,"video":null,"audio":null,"image":{"image":{"alt":null,"width":1735,"height":1152,"caption":null,"webp":"https://a-v-a.gallery/media/pages/journal/emma-buswell-the-pool-pdf-and-interview/1756f7c4f4-1743575484/jcg-iota24-emma-1-photography-sharon-baker-600x.webp 600w, https://a-v-a.gallery/media/pages/journal/emma-buswell-the-pool-pdf-and-interview/1756f7c4f4-1743575484/jcg-iota24-emma-1-photography-sharon-baker-1200x.webp 1200w, https://a-v-a.gallery/media/pages/journal/emma-buswell-the-pool-pdf-and-interview/1756f7c4f4-1743575484/jcg-iota24-emma-1-photography-sharon-baker-1800x.webp 1800w","jpg":"https://a-v-a.gallery/media/pages/journal/emma-buswell-the-pool-pdf-and-interview/1756f7c4f4-1743575484/jcg-iota24-emma-1-photography-sharon-baker-600x.jpg 600w, https://a-v-a.gallery/media/pages/journal/emma-buswell-the-pool-pdf-and-interview/1756f7c4f4-1743575484/jcg-iota24-emma-1-photography-sharon-baker-1200x.jpg 1200w, https://a-v-a.gallery/media/pages/journal/emma-buswell-the-pool-pdf-and-interview/1756f7c4f4-1743575484/jcg-iota24-emma-1-photography-sharon-baker-1800x.jpg 1800w"}}},{"type":"text","id":"9db22ce6-0773-42d4-aa32-b4f39520e388","text":"Constructed as two large scale knitted “tapestries”, The Pool draws from the mythology of Narcissus and Echo from Ovid’s millennia old text ‘Metamorphosis’, using representations of this fable throughout art history to draw parallels to current political frictions, fraught social tensions and dense media landscape we find ourselves entrenched in. Additionally, Buswell makes reference to the Authurian legend of the lady of Shallot to explore the complex relationship between artistic production, societal withdrawal and escapist fantasies.
This myth documents the origin of our understanding of both an echo and what we now know as narcissism, from the word narcissus. In the myth, the feminine Echo is punished for her outspoken “chattiness” and cursed to repeat only the last words uttered by those around her, losing her ability for independent and free speech. In her melancholy, she encounters and falls in love with a young Narcissus, a beautiful youth doomed to fall in love with an image of what he can’t have, his own reflection. The dilemma of these two circling figures in the mythology sets up a scenario for talking to contemporary concerns of the echo chamber and the narcissistic tendencies that are entrenched within our current political class.
","heading":null,"embed":null,"video":null,"audio":null,"image":null},{"type":"image","id":"21c56391-1efa-4fcd-ad92-cf38c81274ee","text":null,"heading":null,"embed":null,"video":null,"audio":null,"image":{"image":{"alt":null,"width":1632,"height":1224,"caption":null,"webp":"https://a-v-a.gallery/media/pages/journal/emma-buswell-the-pool-pdf-and-interview/5abccd0ba9-1743575486/jcg-iota24-emma-6-photography-sharon-baker-600x.webp 600w, https://a-v-a.gallery/media/pages/journal/emma-buswell-the-pool-pdf-and-interview/5abccd0ba9-1743575486/jcg-iota24-emma-6-photography-sharon-baker-1200x.webp 1200w, https://a-v-a.gallery/media/pages/journal/emma-buswell-the-pool-pdf-and-interview/5abccd0ba9-1743575486/jcg-iota24-emma-6-photography-sharon-baker-1800x.webp 1800w","jpg":"https://a-v-a.gallery/media/pages/journal/emma-buswell-the-pool-pdf-and-interview/5abccd0ba9-1743575486/jcg-iota24-emma-6-photography-sharon-baker-600x.jpg 600w, https://a-v-a.gallery/media/pages/journal/emma-buswell-the-pool-pdf-and-interview/5abccd0ba9-1743575486/jcg-iota24-emma-6-photography-sharon-baker-1200x.jpg 1200w, https://a-v-a.gallery/media/pages/journal/emma-buswell-the-pool-pdf-and-interview/5abccd0ba9-1743575486/jcg-iota24-emma-6-photography-sharon-baker-1800x.jpg 1800w"}}},{"type":"text","id":"31f2a691-bc2d-4bec-8410-1244e6f61d1b","text":"Responding to the 2024 Indian Ocean Craft Triennial (IOTA24) theme “Codes in Parallel”, The Pool draws from Buswell’s ongoing interest in representations of women’s labour and fraught sociopolitical tensions. Across two large scale knitted tapestries, Buswell draws from art history, Greek mythology and personal anecdote as storytelling devices to construct an allegory that navigates contemporary anxieties on precarity and risk.
sweet pea Gallery Associate, Samuel Beilby, sat down with Emma Buswell to discuss her latest creative project.
How did you decide on the title?
It was actually a working title for a long time. I used it for an application, for a grant and it stuck around for a while. It seemed to gain more resonance the longer I sat with it. I was thinking about the pool as a reflective surface, the pool in mythology and also the pool in political systems - the idea that you can have a citizens assembly or a committee of people as a section or a demographic of a pool of people.
Is that what’s happening in the scene in the top right hand corner of the larger tapestry?
Yeah, my idea for that was to depict a random pool of citizens, like a public survey, and measure their reaction to the chaos that surrounds them. It’s showcasing traits of narcissism, indifference, but also distress, panic and weeping.
There is a lot to unpack here. How does your process of remixing so many cultural, political and mythological references typically begin? What was the starting point for constructing this narrative?
As you said, my work is quite narrative based. I’m always drawn to stories, particularly stories that have maintained a relevance throughout history. The mythologies that I find myself drawn to at the moment have maintained a resonance over thousands of years as people keep returning to them to draw parallels and discuss contemporary issues. So once I’ve got an idea of a story that I’m particularly drawn to, has relevance to my own life or applies to a situation in proximity to me I’ll start doing research on the ways that these myths or narratives have been depicted through history, particularly art history. That’s the basis of the imagery itself and then from there it’s kind of a matter of collaging this imagery with more contemporary media until it forms a big soup which is overlaid with commentary. It’s a kind of a collapsing of art historical image with memes, with contemporary anxieties. These ideas kind of latch onto me though and there’s not a lot of control over which jigsaw piece is the starting point.
The Pool, like previous works of yours, features a string of text that hovers over certain figures and objects depicted in the scene. Is there any conceptual relevance between this textual labelling in your work and internet humour/online culture as an extension of community discussion and media landscape?
Absolutely. I’m really drawn to memes as a form of code. I guess I think of them as a very contemporary example of how we communicate and are drawn to their ability to capture image and text in a really succinct and robust way that’s incredibly viral. They’re really transmutable and clever devices. And the other thing is that people are trained to read them, which allows a degree of accessibility to the key ideas behind the artwork. I really like the chain imagery in meme production; it’s a format that allows for interchangeability whereby we can swap images in and out of a narrative structure, like editing a source code. The same thing happens in art history as well.
The two works feature an intense, almost acid-wave, fragmentation of colour which has a disorientating effect. However certain figures, such as the artist at work in the portrait tapestry, appear more colourful than others. Can you talk more about the significance of this choice?
In terms of colour, I don’t actually have any control over what the outcome will look like. In fact, the first time that I saw the work was at John Curtin Gallery. I used sock yarn predominantly which is designed as a pattern that repeats around an ankle or a calf. So when you stretch out the repeats, all of the colour and patterns get disrupted, sort of like breaking the code. I literally don’t know how it’s going to turn out until it’s done. With the Barnaby Joyce character I was just picking fairly grey colours, which then caused him to recede into the business of the image because in my mind he was the most normal and boring part of the story. The media image of him being drunk on the street seemed to exist only as a little blip, a small cultural media moment, before everyone forgot about it.
Going back to the viral/online sensibility communicated in the works, the colour selection of the figures and their environment appears to be reflecting their surroundings or undergoing a transmutable exchange - almost like fractured pixels in a corrupted .jpeg file. Do you see this as an allegory of echo-chambers, repeated histories and recycled lore? And does the machine loom have any role in this image/story reproduction?
Yeah, a lot of people are really surprised when I talk about what machine knitting is because when you say the word “machine,” people assume a certain level of automation which is just not present in the technology I’m working with. I guess I’m using a knitting machine in a way that people would never really normally use one. I use my Singer Memo-matic 321 from the 1960’s to do intarsia work, so any of the ingrained functionality within the machine that’s designed to speed up processes is taken away by working with it in this unorthodox way. For example, I’m not able to use a punch card and there’s no plug in electronics. It’s just a process of manually dropping colour over the needles and dragging the carriage across. These machines were predominantly produced in the 1960’s and ‘70’s for housewives, so there’s this history of labour and hobbyist culture attached to them.
I see, the scale of these works also pushes this idea of labour. What do you see as potential implications of combining grandiose statements via large scale tapestries and ancient lore with kitsch aesthetics?
With these works, I was thinking about the earliest roots of textiles and tapestries at such a scale - specifically around the time of the jacquard loom in the early 18th century. This was kind of the basis for what punch cards and further knitting technologies came from as well as modern day computing. Whereas my previous tapestry works presented more as history paintings, I think these come across as more religious paintings, in terms of scale and subject. For me, I like the idea of encountering a work that completely fills your field of vision. I’m hoping that people spend time with them and get lost in the mess when they’re up close which prompts them to take a step back to make more sense of it. I’ve always been drawn to playing around with scale to direct viewers in this way. It can be something like a little beaded chicken-bag that’s tiny but still takes a long time to produce, or a 21m long scarf mapping Perth’s history. I’m interested in blurring these distinctions between grandiose metanarrative and commonplace motifs through taking a material that’s usually fitted around a human body and turning it into something massive, yet still retaining the same amount of detail.
One of the tapestries appears more self-referential than the other, presenting an artist at work whilst chaos ensues outside. Can you speak to the role that the artist figure plays in your work that navigates themes of national political instability?
Something that’s been on my mind lately is the pressure placed on artist’s to provide social commentary, to hold a mirror up to the world and the strain that that can put on creatives. There is a fair amount of privilege in our industry but this role is particularly burdensome to people who are living in precarious situations and are often generating more money for people around them than they are for themselves. It’s a sticky situation we find ourselves in where we’re beholden to that structure but also trapped within it. There’s a 19th century poem about the Lady of Shallot, a character from Arthurian legend, who is the central figure in the tapestry you’re referring to. The story looks at the role of the craftsperson or artist as being burdened with this taxing responsibility of observing but at the same time is trapped by their own circumstance. The mythology tells the story of the lady only being able to observe Camelot through a mirror in her studio, as looking at it directly would inflict a curse on her. It felt like a fitting analogy for where I and many other artists find themselves these days; stuck in between wanting or having to engage with the world around us but also feeling distanced from it.
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