Questioning the roles and limits of learning through the making process, while certainly a beneficial thing for artists working directly with materials, can be seen in the diverse, rich, and personal ways this title has been interpreted in this exhibition.
Clearly, all 62 Group members will be able to categorically state that learning does, and always has, taken place when they are working through ideas with materials. But this exhibition, instigated in the year that the 62 Group has itself been active for 62 years, is relevant for both the Group and the field of textile art as a whole.
There are specific questions — questions that are not specialised or media specific — that every textile artist must ask.
Most importantly for this exhibition: How do we learn and challenge our existing ideas through what we create?
I believe that anyone working in the intellectual and material-based field of textile art, every few years, should question and reflect on essential
questions of their practice and how a relationship to textiles, has changed over time.
The writer and textile curator June Hill has written straightforwardly of the characteristic of textile art: “Process, outcome and response.”
And, in no uncertain terms her scrutiny involves us to: “look at the making and at that which has been made.”
Taking her lead, material-based innovation, new theories of textile art practices and diverse conversations are to be encouraged. But the recent ‘renaissance’ in textile art exhibitions, should not distract us as a long-standing group from engaging, and reengaging, with what we already think we know in the making and made process.
