Jamie-Lee Garner, Un/Conscious, 2024. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Jim A Barker (Twelve Points Photography)

un/conscious

Jamie-Lee Garner

Gallery 4

room sheet

un/conscious is a large-scale artwork that features a collection of sixteen brightly coloured tactile canvases, creating a kaleidoscopic wall of colour. 

The textiles featured are recycled offcuts of vintage towels from Re/lax Remade, a sustainably focused, Sydney-based fashion label. Each piece of fabric is embedded with the memories of previous owners, nostalgic and echoing the childhood of those who remember the towels from grandma’s home. Each piece an ode to the generations of families that owned these towels and the memories permeate each fabric remnant. The act of creating this work is an effort to transform the accumulative memories of the textiles into a new work of beauty.

Colour is an entity, a portal, a phenomena that arises through the interplay of light and sight, acting on our neurology in order to exist. In a sense we put a little bit of ourselves into each colour as we observe it. Consider this coloured wall of canvases as a representation of the complex narrative of memories carried in the consciousness of each human, while the reflective slices offer a moment of personal festaiuolo and reflection, representing the way we un/consciously project our own beliefs, imaginings and assumptions onto those around us.

The process of creating ‘Un/conscious’ took the artist over 6 months and countless pieces of vintage textile offcuts. All the while Jamie-Lee was contemplating the unknown memories embedded in each offcut, her personal memories and incubating her first child. What has long been considered ‘women’s work’, the long and rich history of women working with textiles is more than just earning a living: it has always been an accessible way of expressing their memories, emotions and experiences. “The reality is that, unlike oil paints, some form of needle and thread are the art materials that have been most commonly and widely available to women throughout history. They have given us women, and continue to give, the power to decorate ourselves and our interior environments, and document ourselves in that process.” (No Man’s Land by Stanislava Pinchuk) 

Click here to read the extended statement for un/conscious

This project has been supported by Re/lax Remade and presented in partnership with Metro Arts and Firstdraft.