Camouflage exhibition- Sylvia Watt.

Influential arts editor, Janet De Boer OAM, will open an exciting new exhibition by textile artist Sylvia Watt at Islington’s Timeless Textiles gallery from 6-8pm on Thursday, 16 February.

De Boer created the Australian Forum of Textile Arts in 1981, has edited 100 issues of its well-regarded magazine and led Fibre Forums for more than 20 years.

She will open Camouflage, an exhibition by Brisbane based Watt, who has been an artist all her life and has worked with textiles for more than 20 years, as a maker and teacher.

“At the heart of my work is an exploration of organic form and my main medium is fibres,” says Sylvia. “I have been a felt-maker for 20 years and I love the surprise of it, the surface texture, the response of materials.”

Watt values the clarity and integrity of working with materials that maintain their individual identity, unlike paint. She says her work is more about the process than the product, and more about the medium than the image.

For the Camouflageexhibition, Watt has used a photograph of an Aboriginal woman in a park that her husband took when we were visiting Charters Towers.

“I had been struck by her presence and her physicality,” Watt explained in a recent article in Textile Fibre Forum*. “She seemed so strong, and at the same time invisible to the society around her. She embodied camouflage. These pieces are about consciously pushing the idea of camouflage in the context of that woman.”

“I think the visual arts are like literature in that way – whatever you read or look at, you bring your own life experience to the way you engage with it. That’s what I love about all art, the collaboration between the maker and the audience.”

*(Textile Fibre Forum | Volume 31 | Issue 1 No.105, 2012)