Distress Signal (2021)
Cotton rope
Distress Signal is a plea for help created during Covid-19 isolation in Sydney in 2020. I used rope that has been recycled and unravelled from two of my previous large public sculptures, ‘Dolly’ and ‘Rapunzel’. Distress Signal laments the historic bush fires of Australia, increasing awareness of climate change, on-going inequity for gender and indigenous rights and the current COVID pandemic. Created at home during lock down, the work unwinds the past to create a new sense of urgency spelt out in giant pixelated filet crochet letters.
About the Artist
Tina Fox lives on Cammeraygal Country in Sydney’s North Shore. She is an architect, designer and artist, and has a studio at the TWT Creative Precinct in St Leonards. Tina’s art practice is focused on creating hybrid forms with crochet, to push perceived limitations by shifting scale and medium to challenge notions of gender, domesticity and decoration. Her crochet combines the aesthetics of the digital computer pixel and binary code with filet crochet to create a new crafted language. Tina’s work has been selected for the Tamworth Textile Triennial - Visions 2020, and she won the Innovation Award at Seed Stitch Contemporary Textile Award 2020.
Transcription
Hi, my name is Tina Fox and I'm an artist based in Sydney and I'm exhibiting at Rookwood this year and very excited to be doing so.
My artwork is made by hand and is a large crochet piece called Distress Signal. It's about one m wide and ten metres long and it's suspended from a building at Rookwood and kind of unrolls and unfurls down the steps and it has the words Distress Signal written on it in filet crochet. So my work is made from filet crochet, which is a series of open and closed squares, and I've used these squares to eight letters in my work that spell the words Distress Signal and it acts like a big banner rolling down the steps. Now let me tell you a little bit about my artistic practice and what I've done and what interests me.
I was born in the UK and trained as an architect, but since then I've been creating work from textiles and crotchet for about ten years and I've exhibited around Sydney many times, including two sculptures for Vivid. I've also exhibited at the North Sydney Art Prize a few times and Harbour Sculpture and the Sydney Architecture Festival. At the moment I have a work in the Tamworth Textile Triennial, which is a three year Touring Exhibition of Regional Australia and currently what I'm really interested at exploring in my practice is how craft can make hybrids with technology.
I'm really inspired by coding, language and the machine aesthetic and I like to explore notions of mass manufacturing, domesticity and meaning in craft. I try to create craft fictions and reflect on the past, but look to the future. Now, as an architect, I'm really interested to have the opportunity to show my work in interesting and unusual venues. I'm always inspired by the space around me and the built environment. I really enjoy seeing my work in unusual settings that have their own stories. Often these histories interact with the work and create a really beautiful interplay of texture, colour and meaning. The work and concept is really always elevated when it's in the right space and exciting moments can happen. Rookwood is really exciting in this respect.
It is absolutely layered with nature, history and fabulous textures and it helps to add a deeper interpretation and a richness of meaning to my work. I really hope that the audience can see an unexpected strength in my work. It's made from crochet and it's made by hand, but it's strong and big and powerful and was born out of a sense of frustration during lockdown in twenty-twenty as the world was swirling under the controls of COVID social inequity and climate change. I really felt I had to make something, something that was close to hand, and I ended up making Distress Signal. I tried to harness domesticity and safety to create a really mighty statement from a simple material, using my hands to create something powerful.