By PAT BASKETT
When Susan Jowsey's soiled blanket with stitched crosses won the Visa Gold Art Award in 1996, the hue and cry from the philistines matched that provoked by Britain's Turner Art Award winners.
The headlines moved on and Jowsey settled back into her routine. She has continued to exhibit and she and her husband, photographer Marcus Williams, have had two children. A joint installation with photographer Fiona Pardington, at the George Fraser Gallery in Albert Park, follows an exhibition at the MacPherson Gallery.
Jowsey looks back on the award as a mixed blessing. People were outraged for what she considers were the wrong reasons. "They thought I had transgressed social boundaries by putting dirty washing in a public space, that I was putting something about them on show. But if there'd been no money involved, they wouldn't have been interested."
The publicity had a very negative effect on her because, she says, the commentary became very personal.
"Nobody wanted to discuss the content of the work. They were only interested in the circus sideshow. It was very depressing. The Herald rejected an article a friend of mine wrote on the ideas behind the work."
With the passing of time the benefits have outweighed the disadvantages. There is a sustained interest in her work and for a career artist that is important.
"But I feel a bit labelled. There's this expectation that what I'm going to do will be about mental illness and grungy."
Jowsey gives a subdued laugh because the "grungy" bit is partly true. She has never, she says, found painting with colours particularly fulfilling. But mental illness (the blanket, which was her final submission for her masters degree in fine art, came from her interest in the closure of Carrington Mental Hospital, where her grandmother had been a patient) has not featured directly in her most recent work.
Veronica's Veil, the installation at the George Fraser Gallery, uses religious symbolism in a metaphorical way that also marked the pieces she exhibited at the McPherson Gallery.
There's a mild austerity to Jowsey's physiognomy and it's hard to believe her assertion that she has no religious belief, so deeply is her work imbued with a sense of the religious: crosses, mostly; a pallor that calls up cloisters; the idea of fabric as a shroud. But the cross that interests her is akin to the red cross, the one that stands for protection and help.
"I take the symbolism and use it in a much more personal context. But I don't have any problem with its religious connotations. I'm interested in the concepts - the fall from grace, martyrdom, salvation and the crises of belief." These are things she sees as central to human existence - Christian and non-Christian.
Two works at the MacPherson Gallery consisted entirely of crosses, one set made of soap, the others - more than 90 of them - stitched by Jowsey over the past three years from remnants of her family's clothes and other "bits and pieces of my life."
There, the cross represents repetition, domestic drudgery if you like, and the stitches are the acts of repair, the mending that never finishes.
"That's what being a human being is, especially if you're a mother - the unquenchable giving."
Soap is a metaphor for purification and salvation. Jowsey made 100 soap crosses (apart from the smell, they could have been made from some pale stone) from a recipe of olive oil, vegetable shortening, dripping and caustic soda. They were for sale at $100 each and Jowsey hoped they would be bought and used.
"It's an unstable medium - that's what I Iike about it," she jokes.
Also in that show were a series of pretty images, either stitched onto pieces of blanket or painted onto canvas prepared with gesso, featuring a dove in a circlet of flowers with raindrops - surprising for their cliched saccharinity. The image comes from the story of the bluebird of happiness which women used to embroider - as if their own happiness lay in the act of stitching.
Jowsey explains why she used it: "It's boringly cutesy but it has an element of grief in the rain-like tears. There's an underbelly of questioning of veneers."
Gesso is a very old preparation of whiting and size used traditionally as a ground for painting. Jowsey applies it thinly so that her canvases resemble parchment and the paintings are more like drawings.
Jowsey, Williams and their children are off to Wanganui in September, where they will take up a joint residency at the Sarjeant Gallery. They will work on an installation based on the Jerusalem Sonnets of James K. Baxter.
Art Award both curse and blessing
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