2013

The Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award celebrates the diversity and strength of Australian textile art. Building on Wangaratta's long and prominent history of textile manufacturing, and craft making, the award furthers this unique tradition and social history by elevating and promoting the development of contemporary textile practice in Australia.

Winner 

Paul Yore was the recipient of the Wangaratta Contemporary Textile award 2013 for his work, Map, 2012.

Forty-six artists working in contemporary textile-related media as varied as tapestry, sculpture, printing, dyeing, assemblage, embroidery, felting, digital projection, paper fibre, and natural grasses were selected for the award exhibition from over 160 entries from all over Australia.

The judge for the 2013 award was Kelly Gellatly, Director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne.

Paul Yore commented on his winning work:

"I see my work with textiles as always a negotiation of both the poetic and the political. A medium often relegated to the realm of ‘craft’, I see working with wool as a subtly subversive methodology, and an opportunity to engage in socio-political critique.  As a laborious yet cathartic craft, the delicately feminine familiarity and domestic warmth of my hand-sewn tapestries allows me to open up and question traditional notions of masculinity through the enactment of a highly personalized queer ritual.  Furthermore, wool carries with it frontier pastoral associations of early colonial expansion, and it is in this context that the work Map, which is based on the ethnographic mapping of indigenous language groups, was envisioned."

Rebus of Beechworth sponsored a Highly Commended award of $500, which was awarded to Gillian Lavery for her work, Thread Translation.

Paul Yore, Map, 2012, textile, 900 x 112cm. Winner of the Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award 2013.