Sienna Barton – 'BBV (Big Beautiful Vase)', 2023

This piece is the culmination of over a year's work. I started this vessel midway through 2022, in the throes of my MFA. I believed it to be finished nearly a year ago, back when I'd sewn my handmade yarn into a gigantic, shallow bowl. The shape was cumbersome, unruly, and ultimately useless. It annoyed me. When I was asked to create something for this show, I went back and unpicked every stitch of that bowl and started afresh. What we've got now exists more like a monument to what the work used to be. Worked on for hundreds of hours, this work was created from old painting rags, an ex-fling's shirt (sorry, not sorry), wool from my grandparents' many trips to the op shop, and finished with uncountable tiny seed beads.

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Sienna Barton is a Naarm-based painter and textile artist. Freshly graduating from the MFA program at RMIT University, her artistic practice is obsessive and time-consuming. Often serving as a means of soothing fidgety fingers, her work seeks to transform anxious energy into tangible works of art. She’s currently focusing on craft as a radical act of self-care, while trying to understand her relationship to colour: why pink features so prolifically and why red makes her cringe. Her textile works utilise discarded materials from local clothing labels and her own wardrobe, while others are collected by her grandparents during their weekly trips to the op shop. It’s a true labour of love, and each thread has an embodied history.

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Everyone’s heard of a dragon  

Curated by James Lemon and Bobby Corica

11 November  23 – 27 January 24 

Read about the exhibition

Material: collected and discarded fabrics, new and vintage threads, shredded
paintbrush rags, collected and new beads

Dimensions: approx. 56 x 50cm