2013

Winner: Paul YORE, Map

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.  Ms Gellatly announced the winner of the $8000 acquisitive award at the exhibition opening on Saturday 1 June at 11am.  The prize was awarded to Paul Yore for his wool tapestry “Map”, this winning work has become part of the Wangaratta Art Gallery’s growing art collection. In addition “Rebus” of Beechworth sponsored a Highly Commended award of $500, which was awarded to Gillian Lavery for her work “Thread Translation”.

 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 associaltions 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.

image: Paul Yore, Map, 2012,Wangaratta Art Gallery Collection. Winner of the 2013 Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award.