Deborah Klein
WAYS OF BEING
December 4-24 2024
Stephen McLaughlan Gallery, Melbourne
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
- T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding (from Four Quartets), 1942
In my latest solo exhibition Ways of Being, I pick up the threads of the pivotal Tattooed Faces and Faces and Figures of 1995-97 and, to a lesser extent, the insect women and masked women series (originating in 2000 and 2007 respectively), to weave entirely new narratives.
The original iteration of the Tattooed Faces and Faces and Figures provided frameworks for the development of new iconography, a substantial amount of which underpins my paintings and works on paper to this day. Among the key works to emerge at this time were those focusing on “the gentle arts” - women’s handiwork created specifically for the domestic realm. As Rozsika Parker posits in her pioneering book, The Subversive Stitch (1996), women’s histories are recorded on fabric, not on stone.
In my earlier works, body decorations inspired by textile arts memorialised the countless anonymous women who created those textiles. Over the passing years, however, a handful of names and faces have begun to emerge - foremost, for me, British Arts and Crafts textile and embroidery designer (also wallpaper and jewellery designer, embroiderer, socialist and educator), May Morris. Her exquisite designs were points of departure for several paintings and linocuts in the exhibition.
For over two decades, many of my protagonists have resolutely turned their backs on the viewer. Drawing from the age-old motif of Rückenfigur, a compositional device most closely aligned with German Romantic painting, these solitary figures remain intrinsic to my work. They are represented in the exhibition by the Decorated Women, a suite of seven linocuts, and the hand-coloured linocut I Wished on the Moon, 2022. The latter work was created in collaboration with Simon White at the Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne, as part of the 2020 APW George Collie Memorial Print Award.
Essentially Ways of Being (a pun on Ways of Seeing, John Berger’s seminal 1972 television series and the subsequent book by Berger and others) is what W. Somerset Maugham referred to in his homonymous memoir of 1938 as The Summing Up. As I aim to piece together disparate fragments from over 40 years of practice, seeking, perhaps, some kind of finality, fresh ideas and the possibilities of new directions persistently insinuate themselves. To quote again from T. S. Eliot’s poem, Little Gidding:
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
Deborah Klein
December 2024
CATALOGUE
PAINTINGS
FOR ALL ENQUIRIES, CONTACT:
Telephone: 0407 317 323
Email: st73599@bigpond.net.au
Gallery hours: Wednesday - Friday, 1 - 5 pm
Saturday 11 am - 5 pm
& by appointment
During the run of WAYS OF BEING, the gallery will also be open
from 1-5 pm on Sunday December 22 ,
Monday December 23 and Tuesday December 24
