Anton Veenstra's Textile Blog

From the mid 1970’s I have woven tapestries, at first influenced by Kevin, that is to say, stepped weft shapes. What I failed to resolve was how to cover large areas at an acceptable pace. Later, my solution was to use thicker wefts combined with slits left open. This satisfied my pace of work but had other drawbacks. The edges were roughly aligned. I was told ateliers sewed the gaps as the work progressed. But the particular technique was never clear. Two decades ago I moved to the interlocking of wefts. People kept telling me it was a feature of traditional Norwegian folk weaving. What had changed was an aspect of my personality. I accepted that patience and application were also desirable alongside the fierce, impetuous weaving of a younger self. However, it seemed I had attracted a naif, outsider identity. Like my favourite post-Impressionist artists, Derain et al, known as the wild boys, the Nabis. Almost immediately I had begun to use buttons and other industrial materials in assemblages or combines as Rauschenberg called them. Mine, however, were figurative and too easily fitting with that contemporary phenomenon of depiction using an unexpected material and achieving a high degree of verisimilitude.

From buttons that depicted scenes of my refugee, ethnic, working class, cowboy identity I moved to combinations of materials that nodded to Carl Appel’s work as viewed in the Netherlands. An entire section of his oeuvre was about children’s toys, entirely hand carved, roughly and then covered with violently slashed paint.

This, ironically, was an interesting lead to the influence of a 2015 group show, More Love Hours, at the Uni of Melbourne Ian Potter Museum, curated by Susie Warne, a US post-Pop installation of children’s stuffed toys.

My progression was to creating fields of small units combined, bottle tops.made into eyes or mouths, a comment on Australian machismo. Otherwise, plastic buckles overwoven, wrapped and knotted with coloured electrical wire. In common with tapestry was the fact that the knot used was the double half hitch. My realisation now is that, (desiring this person’s craft and that person’s art), yes, not an exact quote, one of the admirable aspects of others’ achievement in their craft is combining colours. For whatever reason, I have always avoided this. Perhaps it is my cultural legacy from van Gogh, the slash of pure colour. Someone like Deborah Silver achieves amazing blends.

Perhaps my medium of coloured wire wrapped etc around coloured plastic buckled has finally arrived at this complexity of colour.

The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request has two magnificent songs imbued with the psychedelic aura of the time. Like a Rainbow is a portrait: See her dressed in gold, like a queen in days of old. The problem, a mondegreen, a word that describes the experience of a listener mishearing the words of a rock song and concocting new lyrics, usually nonsense, always Freudian. After all, it was Mick Jagger who practically invented the phenomenon when he said never to sing lyrics so they could be easily understood. So, in this song, everyone understood the words as “lady pharoah” when in fact they were “a lady fairer”. Even Wiki acknowledges the mistake.

It was only during the sewing of this work, when I coaxed Youtube to play the song with written lyrics that I realised what the group was singing. By then, I had found a gold pyramidal stud to create the border. The work actually began with the ear pieces, which I could not give away. From there I constructed the oval of the face and added buckles for the eyes, nose, mouth and ears. A thickly crusted tiara of jewelled buttons, with others that formed the shoulder and dress line, and different, natural pearl shell buttons added luminescence. Six bird’s eye shaped within clouds formed a seraphic circle as an iconic frame.

The bottom half of the work is comprised of three horizontal squares, the geometry within chaos that a friend said was so frequently to be found in Paul Klee’s work.

Please, no twitting person to reply that I’ve used the wrong spelling.

In Oscar Wilde’s time our dilemma was described thus: “the love that dare not speak its name”. To which, upon our liberation, we were said not to be able to shut up. In the 1940s and 1950s, when homosexuality was illegal, in fact seen and treated as a mental illness, there were no polite words for identity. A shrug of the shoulder, a wink or a sigh, “you know, one of them”, or queer. After all, there are no nice words to describe people with a mental illness, just a monstrous, latinate polysyllable. And there was nothing able about homosexual; it was even a lumbering construct of Greek and Latin. Rarely have scholars stumbled so.

When we were on the streets, in the rough and tumble, making our way, we were “queer”. We were, in politer circles, noted as effeminate. After all, a masculine man was above suspicion and had the self protective instinct to not draw attention. Recently, a woman on the phone had to confirm the spelling of my name. You know: A for apple, B for Bob. N was nellie. As soon as I heard her use that word I knew my fate was sealed.

In the 1970s, when lavender coalitions began to demand liberation. we chanced upon the word gay. There was a shadowy backstory to the word. When the troubadours roamed Europe they were considered dubious and sexually aberrant. They were described as “gai”. We inherited the word and developed its meaning as whimsical, lyrical, out of musical comedy. Gay Lib appropriated the word. A contemporary, who was otherwise well disposed, said she thought it a pity that we now owned the word, that she had liked to use it. Likewise, an Englishman turned Buddhist monk, with whom I studied meditation, told us a story about a day in Bangkok and being approached by a miserable man who told the monk he was gay. In spite of the Buddha’s teachings about compassion the monk thought this situation had been hilarious. One can only hope he did not laugh openly. Certainly half the monk’s class up and left on that note.

Likewise, another homophobe, also incidentally English, who was teaching us Arabic, had a list of sentences to translate, among which was: “I struck the man whose hand was in my pocket”.

Today, in a time of non-binaries and a coalition of communities men might describe themselves as “queer” or even “faggots”. The latter term arose during the execution of witches when gay men arrested in flagrante delicto were bundled with sticks and timber and provided fuel for the burning of wise women.

Never let it be forgotten that we suffered together.

Not all those who wander are lost.

A friend texted me some jpgs. Included or accidentally attached was the image of a work I completed in the 1980’s. I now call it SHEEN, approx. 16 cms H X W. It represents for me that iconic image of Martin Sheen emerging stealthily from the Vietnamese river in Apocalypse Now. The person who accepted it grudgingly grumbled that it looked like a dead person. The two perceptions share common ground. My friend developed symptoms of dementia and spent his last days in a nursing home. When he died his family removed his belongings, including my work, to some unknown destination.

You have to hope that your labour, your spark of life was valued in the way the work was preserved. It does make the case that living with tapestry, especially in the blaring sunshine of this antipodean continent, is no mean feat.

Likewise, in the 1980’s the Powerhouse ran a craft competition called Billycan. Five entrants were given the bush vessel and our brief was to decorate it, of course ironically. The winning entrant was a cut and paste job, I’m not sure where our entries went. My work, as I had taken the brief seriously, was simply woven tapestry. That was my metier. The image was surreal, of a leaping fish and a grevillea flower. Hopefully, my work is stored in the vaults. Such accidents and incidents are food for rumination. Hoop, 25 cms Diag X 5 cms.

A third tale of woe, the disappearance of Billy Idol, might sound like professional lamentation. The rest is silence.

The following is in no way an exposition of first nation mythology. That would be appropriation. The viewpoint I take is to examine Australian colonial history from a European perspective.

The title I have used is an elemental or devil, an Arabic word. It refers to my six weeks holiday in Egypt in 1980. I was fortunately befriended by a group of Teachers’ College students who decided I was a suitable student to be taught the Arabic language. By whatever means I managed to absorb quite a vocabulary. One of my favourite was “mumkin ashoof henna?” which roughly means “may one look here?” I made use of this at the door to the famous El Azhar mosque in the middle of Cairo, much to the gate keeper’s delight. “Mumkin, mumkin”. Translated: “Come in by all means”.

But “Ifrit” I never had explained to me. I could have remembered that moment in the movie Aladdin, when a fierce spirit describes himself as an “ifrit of the blue djinn”. I was accompanying the students, my teachers, to a market place. The day was hot, the air dusty. I was, doubtless, scowling. Suddenly a stall holder looked at me, pointed ferociously and declaimed “ifrit, ifrit”. My friends led me away but I insisted that they explain. Embarrassed, they told me it meant elemental or devil. As some were Christians, others Moslem, the word was not specific to either culture.

Why is this relevant to the two creatures? I recently saw a video of a number of these animals being raised in a zoo. It struck me that each animal’s temperament was quite different. The one on the left is hesitant, the other dominant and exploratory.

Back in the day, when European colonials determined to possess the land they encountered these creatures. Because they hissed fiercely and constantly, the convicts and settlers called them Tasmanian devils. Doubtless, that was sufficient excuse to massacre them. I will use the European name reluctantly.

What struck me starting this work, and remembering my own experience, is how people will use their religion to explain what has not previously been made clear to them, and justify their response. The convicts and settlers extended this superstitious thinking to an ideology. Take over land, destroy its animals and food sources. Then massacre the original inhabitants whose only recourse was to kill the settlers’ sheep to live. Kill the first nations during the week then attend church or chapel on Sunday, having not a skerrick of misgiving about men, women and children massacred.

Sadly, I do not have a First nation word for these creatures. From the colonial word it may be inferred that they inhabited Tasmania.

Among the various buttons I have made use of are a number of cloth covered ones. Over the years I have collected these. Some are more recent, industrially produced as they have a plastic fastener on the reverse. Others are older, dirtier but also more exciting. Many are made of fragments of 1930’s, art deco cloth. Others seem to be coins covered with cloth. They all have individual, mysterious narratives, which one conjectures with relish.

Englishmen and other adventurers of the age of the Enlightenment sailed to this continent, mapping all that they sailed through, and claiming the land in the name of their ruler. Thus began a series of massacres, as yet not comprehensively narrated, certainly not compensated for. They made use of an opportunistic concept, “terra nullius” or vacant land, denying the legitimacy of the First Nations who lived here, their narratives and their way of life.

My work attempts to acknowledge this lack of redress. Cartography, verbally constructed in the poems of Homer, Dante, Milton and Blake, are spiritual journeys. One wonders what awareness and concern about contemporary events these artists had. Blake’s misgivings are documented, and as the song goes, “how he suffered for his sanity”.

I reference the winged phalloi of the island of Delos and the serenity of the island. Yet, a friend told me of the cruel history that covered this island with blood and misery. It was a hub in the Mediterranean for the ancient Greek slave trade. “All’s changed, changed utterly, A terrible beauty is born”.

As part of telling one’s narrative, the ancestors are invoked. On this land I was born to a refugee mother, behind wire fencing, her movements regulated by governmental bureaucracy. The First Nations whose link to this continent is primal, always began any new ceremony with an acknowledgement of the ancestors of the place on which they stood. Being a child of the 1950’s nuclear family my lineage is short circuited, certainly by language difficulties. Instead, I established an objective couple, the Cycladic mother and the winged phallus of Delos.

Reparative Cartography, 84 cms H X W. Bangles, coiled wire, metal and plastic buckles, bound, knotted and woven with multi-coloured electrical wire, buttons, sewn onto cloth with upholsterer’s polyester thread.

I must acknowledge the influence that First Nation dot paintings had on my work. In 1983 a close friend travelled to Alice Springs to teach there. When I visited him a year later we began collecting paintings, especially by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. Works such as “seated man digging at the root of a flowering vine” developed a new school of abstraction for me, as well as paying homage to his Nation and land. He died in 2002 but I sing his praise.

Adjoining is haphazard. Colours not necessarily symbolic. Electrical cable with a core of 20+ differently coloured and mottled wires. The inner core of the mandala is based around a belt buckle, wrapped with a more solid wire (1 of 3 that together comprise ordinary electrical cable).

The outer perimeter has more of a narrative. I began collecting women’s wrist bangles. I could not believe a person could fold their hand so as to fit it into such a small circle. Firstly, I wrapped two of these to form a solider core. However, having bought an amount of gal wire from my hardware store, I raided my kitchen cupboard drawer where I stored my chef’s tools. Amongst them I found a cookie cutter and used that to wrap a double length of the wire, fixed it firmly, then wrapped it with the larger electrical cable,

The textile component of my project consists in wrapping, interweaving and knotting the thinner wires around the two cores. The knots are the double half hitch used at the top and bottom of a woven tapestry. A flaw with the knot is its tendency to rotate around the wire, and has to be periodically corrected.

Although each of the above ten works can be considered individuals in their own right, they may be absorbed in a larger future project.

Les deux lutins:

the elf of daylight, the elf of night.

In one of those moments between decisive gestures on my current work, I was in fact sorting needed buttons. I found two objects which I decided should be thrown into the basket containing things that might have been worked on during a previous project. To date, I have separated my creative output into three areas: woven tapestry, button and object assemblage, and wire and object constructions. This latter consists of objects chosen for their organic energy, and are covered with electrical wire, the current coils contain 20 different colours and combinations, which are then knotted, woven or wrapped around the object.

Often, the activity leads one blindly into the darkness of the creative subconscious. Nothing is pre-planned. The object has an organic shape that suggests possibilities. In this instance a small piece of hollow dark brown plastic was riddled with holes which allowed for wires to cover more completely. It also accommodated a small, white plastic curtain ring. The two sat together nicely. They encouraged my projections from an earlier project where I had decided that knotting need not be tight but might allow a subsequent row to follow.

Whether it is my ubiquitous bottle top or any other circular object, they invite the addition of one of a bunch of buttons I have collected over time, that shimmer as if light is playing in the depths of an eyeball.

Approx. 10 cms diameter. For those who might ask how long did it take I can reveal: most of a morning, 5 hours?

Button collage, 79 cms H X 50 cms W, buttons, bottle tops sewn with upholsterer’s polyester thread onto stretched canvas.