The Anything You Want Machine by Kirsten Farrell at ANCA Gallery 10–28 May 2023
Kirsten Farrell [she/her] is a queer multidisciplinary artist who trained as a painter at the ANU School of Art in Canberra and continues to live on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri land. Her practice encompasses conceptual, object-based installation, textile and performative modes of practice and is nonetheless grounded in painting.
Farrell’s plastic textiles propose a future where plastic is a cherished and mystical material that signifies care, wisdom and feminine power.
According to Farrell: “There is a famous scene in the 1999 Sam Mendes film American Beauty: a plastic bag caught in a little vortex of air causing it to spiral upwards, dancing like a celestial creature. It’s memorable because usually plastic is a sign of banality, dirtiness, abjection even.”
Plastic was once considered a magical material. It was conceived as a thing that could take the shape of almost anything that humans desired. Yet it has long since become ubiquitous and devalued, synonymous with inauthenticity and cheapness whereas the word in its original sense meant flexibility, possibility, malleability. We now understand that it is made from finite natural resources and it does not ever break down. Its overuse and the massive and horrifying piles of it in oceans and landfill further associate it with the current age of human-generated climate change. It has become a sign of not-caring—of not enough care being taken.
Taking influences from Japanese boro mending, Gees Bend quilt making, Arte Povera and colour field abstract painting, Farrell’s plastic textiles propose a future where plastic is instead a cherished and mystical material that signifies care, wisdom and feminine power. Using plastic encountered in daily life to make abstract compositions, in The Anything You Want Machine Farrell revises the persistent binary of textile as feminine and painting as masculine, as well as the aesthetic value of plastic via laborious craft-based processes.
Kirsten Farrell, Anthropocene boro (detail), 2022, found plastic and cotton thread, 40 x 50cm.