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Causes of Failure in Jam

Held on the 13th Apr 2019 to
14th Apr 2019


Add to Calendar 2019-04-13 --:--:-- 2019-04-14 --:--:-- Australia/Sydney Causes of Failure in Jam

Image of artwork Marjorie Details

Image credit: Kathryn Camm, Marjorie Details, soft sculpture with beading and polymer clay, 2019. Photograph courtesy of the artist

Exhibition guest opening speaker: Kirsty Máté, designer and educator
Exhibition opening: 4.00pm - 5.30pm Saturday 13 April
Exhibition dates: 15 April - 10 May
Exhibition curators: Kathryn Camm, Mae Finlayson and Dr. Karen Hall
Exhibition artists: Kathryn Camm, Mae Finlayson, Holly Leonardson, Emma Magnusson-Reid, Louise Parsons, Amelia Rowe

Marjorie Bligh looms large: as a maker of craft and maker of self, her presence inescapably permeates Tasmania. Causes of Failure in Jam, a title taken from one of Marjorie’s innumerable top tips, brings together six Tasmanian women artists whose work tests the boundaries of fine art and craft practices to respond to the tensions, themes and material practices that characterise Bligh’s works and life.

Marjorie was deeply involved in both her community and home life; navigating a public performance that used competitions and publicity to bring the often private realm of domestic and emotional labour into prominence. Her preoccupation with romantic love and adornment emerge in this exhibition as a questioning of gender roles and everyday intimacies, of clothing and bodies becoming excessive and uncanny. Marjorie lived through a transition from a locally-based, and often self-sufficient economy and lifestyle to a globalised era of mass consumption: championing the value and creativity of repair and maintenance and re-valuing throw-away items. The undercurrents of scarcity, preservation and consumption are present in potential incongruities of re-use and the strategies of repetition, reproduction and deviation. She travelled widely, saw herself as having at least national relevance, and engaged in acts of determined and self-driven place making. Marjorie’s range of publications, from the highly practical handy hints through to her idiosyncratic relating of history, open up the possibilities of borrowing and destabilising narratives.

This exhibition forms a reciprocal relationship with the QVMAG exhibition Marjorie Bligh: Domestic Goddess. The Bligh collection, now held at QVMAG, is a selection from her own acts of crafting, collecting, documentation and publication that embodies a highly constructed image, yet this image is ferociously authentic. The collection forms a series of provocations for makers: skilled and inventive, but also incoherent, inadvertently eroticised and excessive.

Causes of Failure in Jam presented by the Academy Gallery with the support of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery and the School of Creative Arts and Media, University of Tasmania.

The Academy Gallery will be closed for the Easter period Friday 19 to Tuesday 23 April and ANZAC Public Holiday on Thursday 25 April.

Gallery Hours  Monday - Friday 9.00am - 5.00pm Free Admission