From roast chook bags to Greek myths: the kitsch and clever art of Emma Buswell
StoriesSep 25, 2024
Photo credit: Sharon Baker, install view John Curtin Gallery.
Artist Emma Buswell explores systems of power, culture and kitsch, and her own family history through matrilineal craft techniques. Virally famous for the knitted ‘roast chook bag’, her latest exhibition is her largest work to date: two large scale knitted “tapestries” titled The Pool, exhibiting now at the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial (IOTA24) in Perth.
We spoke with Emma about how The Pool uses Greek mythology to explore current trends, how funding has helped her make the leap to full time artist, and her ongoing research into the history of women’s labour.
Your work exhibiting at IOTA24, The Pool, deals with contemporary anxieties around politics and echo chambers, and you reference the myths from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. What intrigues you about these questions, and what inspired you to make this work?
“The theme for IOTA this year is Codes in Parallel, so I’ve been reading and researching recently into binary code and stitch and how the Jacquard loom (a textile machine) was one of the first instances of computing. It was a really good way of trying to incorporate so much information from the world, and my own perspective and experiences, and codify them within a tapestry.
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“For me, art has always been about reflecting the world around us and the current moment, but what I found really interesting in some of the recent works I have been doing is marrying them to stories and images that are often hundreds or thousands of years old, like Ovid’s Metamorphosis and the tale of Narcissus and Echo. And I am a millennial, constantly worried about housing and the state of politics and the world and inflation and the experiences that we have because of the decisions of people in power.”
Some of your earlier works had a playfulness and whimsy to them, like the stitched roast chook bag and kebab jumper. Was it a conscious decision to reference more serious issues, like cost-of-living, with this work?
“I think there’s always a bit of balance in my work. So even though the chicken bag might look hilarious and funny, it’s dealing with cost of living and class and welfare issues. I was a generation of kids that grew up with Centrelink support. My parents were a night nurse and a landscape gardener. They didn’t have a lot of money and so for us that idea of having a cooked chicken was only a twice a year treat. It’s embroidering and embedding so much toil and labour into these objects that hopefully will make people second guess what luxury means to different people.
“Same with the kebab jumper, that was made during a time when we went into lockdown and our very movements were controlled by government mandates. So even though they’re funny, they’re a bit of a slow moment to take stock of what’s actually happening in the world.”
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What was the process of physically creating The Pool?
“I use 1960s knitting machines to make my work. It’s a really laborious process where you’re manually laying stitches over the bed of a machine and then dragging a carriage across. These works are made over a course of about five months, going between research first and then drawing and sketching, designing, and then the actual manual process of the knitting. And this is the first time I was able to make work on this scale, because I had the money to be able to do it – I could buy the materials and actually pay for a fabricator to make the aluminium frames for the works.
“It’s been a really rewarding process, a very incredible thing to go through, but ultimately, it’s a reminder that we need time to make these things. That was the luxury in the work, the time.”
How did funding help you to achieve this work?
“I’ve recently made the decision to quit my day job, so it basically supported me through that time.”
“Instead of being predominantly an arts worker, now I’m hoping to focus more on being a full-time artist. It was a great stepping-stone between that decision and then being in this project. It also enabled me to employ a studio assistant to help me with weaving-in all the ends and seaming up the work, which in itself is weeks of work. Also getting the fabrication for the frames done, and just being able to participate fully in making a work of this scale.”
I imagine it’s a shift in perspective for how you work?
“I’m a bit of a control freak with the making, so it’s been good to work out what you can actually let go of and what you can let other people help you with.”
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Can you tell us about how the myths of Narcissus and Echo are refracted in this work?
“During COVID I got really into listening to Greek and Roman mythology, and what struck me is that through contemporary lenses, a lot of those stories hold resonance now. This was a story about a nymph, Echo, who was gossiping and chatting, and Zeus’s wife Hera thought that Zeus was flirting with her. So not punishing Zeus, but punishing Echo, she cursed Echo to only ever be able to repeat the words of people around her in conversation and never her own thoughts. And in Echo’s story, she stumbles through the woods and comes upon Narcissus, who’s been similarly cursed by the goddess of justice to only fall in love with his own reflection. That’s where narcissism and echo come from, in mythology. It seemed like a resonant analogy for contemporary politics, in the way that the media and tabloids relate to political systems, and particularly the three-year political cycle that we have here.”
What are you researching right now?
“I am doing a couple of commissions. One for a newly founded women’s law firm in Perth, looking into women’s justice and the way that has been represented through legal history in Australia. There’s always tinkering in the background. One thing that I’m really looking forward to researching more is the history of knitting and labour movements. I’m hoping to do some overseas research into that. I’ve also been finishing off another chicken bag for a work that’s opening at Canberra Biennial in a couple of days.”
The “bachelor’s handbag” gets a second go.
“This is the third edition now. It’s been an accidental annual practice of making one. The first year that I made that, it went viral and then the Macquarie Dictionary People’s Choice for Word of the Year was “bachelor’s handbag”. That just seems coincidental.”
