Visual Arts / Units, Jacqueline Stojanović. At ANU Drill Hall Gallery, until August 30. Reviewed by KERRY-ANNE COUSINS.
Jacqueline Stojanović is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Melbourne.
Her exhibition at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery, called Units, draws on her Vietnamese and Serbian background with their rich textile traditions.
Each of these countries has a cultural heritage that is expressed through the weaving skills of their artisans. They developed textiles and patterns over many years to represent family allegiances, status and a sense of belonging to a particular cultural group.
Stojanovic’s work in this exhibition honours her cultural heritage and, although not reproducing these traditional patterns or weaving techniques, her work needs to be seen in this context.

Traditional patterns for weaving are worked out as repeat patterns and although the designs that Stojanovic constructs follow this basic concept they remain as geometric abstractions.
The unit the artist uses is the square, based on a millimetre ruled A4 graph paper. She then builds up her designs making patterns of small squares using coloured pencils on the graph paper. In the creation of these geometric abstract designs, she references her mentor the Australian artist John Nixon (1949-2020) whose art practice centered on geometric abstraction.
However, I was more drawn to the little cubic blocks, four across and four down that were made up of small, coloured squares like tesserae. While most of these cubes are in plain colours, a smaller cube of six small blocks (Azbuka Alphabet) is ornamented by tiny letters and in Zvezeda Column, small eight wooden cubes are reassembled as a wooden column.
In other works, she replicates the weaving loom by using metal grids. In Blokovi (urban neighborhoods), strands of wool and silk are woven across and in and out the metal grid in a technique loosely based on the warp and weft of the loom. The result is a rich field of colours suggesting the different blocks of a suburban landscape.
Other examples of the artist’s hand-woven pieces also use traditional skills.
Window, is a small tapestry where tiny squares of bright colour appear at intervals in its plain-woven background to suggest its title. Azbuka Rug is a hand-woven tapestry of wool and cotton. The artist has taken some of the patterns and motifs of a traditional Serbian rug and used them in an abstract design bringing together tradition and contemporary practice. In Triptych II a hand-woven work is seemingly a simple design of vertical blocks of colour, yet viewed at a distance a subtle optic twist in the weaving reveals a woven band in the fabric.
This is an intriguing exhibition. What appears on the surface to be works of geometric abstraction, have a deeper relevance to tradition than is at first apparent. A sense of order, control but ultimately cultural continuity links these contemporary works and relates them to traditional textile skills in a subtle and meaningful way.
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