Megan Kirwan-Ward // Stitchscape

Exploring stitch as a means to manipulate cloth, to connect layers of colour and patterning and to illuminate found objects, this exhibition looks at how thread can find a way between what is gathered and what is made. Each piece is imbued with the thoughts and responses that Megan experienced through her journeys from South-East Asia to northern Australia.

Megan Kirwan-Ward is a textile artist who has worked extensively in the arts for over four decades. Teaching, exhibiting and administrative positions concerned with cross-cultural exchanges in the 1990s led to an ongoing collaboration with West Sumatran craftswomen through an Asialink artist residency, resulting in textile works shown throughout the region.

In 2011 an invitation to work with Indigenous women in the East Kimberley expanded to ongoing workshops and residencies in a number of communities that concentrated on the development of block printing, dyeing and stitching skills.

While Megan has exhibited sought-after large-scale sculptural work in Perth, Canberra, India and Indonesia, Stitchscape is her first foray into framing her textile pieces for exhibition and her first solo show at the Art Collective WA gallery.

‘This new work has emerged as a distillation of ongoing preoccupations with stitch as a mark maker, a manipulator, a means to form layers of colour and texture. The pieces are also a response to landscape, something I now see more clearly than I did, perhaps, at the time.’

// View more of Megan's available works in our online Stockroom - click the Stockroom tab on our website. //