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Portfolio
Collection
It
is timely that the contribution of Valerie Kirk is recognized
in Volume 25 of the Portfolio Collection series from Telos
Art Publishing. As Sue Walker, Director of the Victorian
Tapestry Workshop notes in her foreword, Kirk is an important
international figure in the world of contemporary tapestry.
As an artist, writer, teacher and public figure she has
made a significant contribution to tapestry in Australia,
forging valuable and tangible links with the Scottish tradition.
Kirk’s Masters thesis, completed in 2000, was concerned
with investigating and documenting these links, in particular,
the founding of the Victorian Tapestry Workshop and the
involvement of key figures including Archie Brennan and
Belinda Ramson. For Kirk the study was of personal consequence;
it constituted a reengagement with her heritage. Kirk has
come full circle, a momentous and defining point in an artist’s
journey. Originally from Scotland, Kirk trained at the Edinburgh
College of Art and moved to Australia in 1987. Her migration,
mirrored in the preoccupations of her art, has become a
personal metaphor for the relocation of tapestry traditions
from Scotland to Australia.
The narrative of the journey is a recurrent and layered
theme providing depth for the reader. It emerges in Walkers’
foreword and in a short essay by Dr Grace Cochrane, Curator
of Decorative Art and Design at Sydney’s Powerhouse
Museum, which gives a succinct overview of the artist in
Australia’s tapestry and broader craft landscape.
Anne Brennan, author of the substantial third essay, expands
on the idea. A lecturer in art theory at the Australian
National University, Brennan is an artist in her own right.
Her perspective provides a pithy and evocative reading of
Kirk’s recent work and is meticulous in its detail.
Since she arrived in Australia, Valerie Kirk’s work
has explored questions of identity and migration, using
the language and history of textiles as metaphors for her
shifting experience of self and place. Earlier works layered
references to landscape and Australian textile artifacts
to refer to the process of negotiating a sense of place,
mobilizing the surfaces of her tapestries in a an interplay
between interior and exterior, nature and culture, public
and domestic space. Her latest work, made between 1997 and
2001, during which time she spent some months in Scotland,
returns to specifically Scottish textile practices to extend
and further explore questions of identity and place.
Brennan neatly sums up the concepts motivating Kirk’s
art and the differences in her early and later works. The
journey is also evident in the illustrations, which include
installation shots and richly textured details, of works
from the 1980s through to 2002. Featuring earthy colour
and imagery derived from landscape, the early works contrast
with recent pieces, which are achromatic and focus on intimately
scaled pattern and motifs referencing the Scottish textile
traditions of Ayrshire needlework and Sanquhar knitting.
The dramatic graphic quality of the tapestries is mirrored
in recent drawings and gouache paintings that also serve
the artist as a developmental tool
The symbolism of the salmon and the white rose is revealing;
their recent repetition attests to their importance. While
the salmon, said to be a wise fish, is most strongly associated
with the courage and self-sacrifice of its spawning journey,
the white rose suggests purity, beauty, regeneration and
the certainty of divine love. Part of an intensely personal
symbolic language capable of communicating to a wide audience
and evoking a range of individual responses, it provides
an intriguing glimpse into the artist’s heart. The
Portfolio Collection Valerie Kirk represents a fascinating
artistic and personal evolution, but it leaves the reader
feeling that it is also a beginning.
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