Anna Farago: PATCH

15 September - 8 October, 2023
Loft275, Ivanhoe Library & Cultural Hub

Patch is an exhibition of Anna Farago’s artworks made over the past decade. These include large patchworks, small embroideries, and quilted soft paintings. Performative photography shows the artist and/or textiles temporarily installed in various sites of personal significance, including Farago’s garden in Montmorency, the Darebin Parklands where she undertook an artist residency in 2015/16, and returning to the site of her childhood home in the mountains of GunaiKurnai Country, where logging causes rupture and destruction to fragile ecosystems.

Variously the works are informed by grief, loss, shock, pain, and isolation but also by comfort, care, kindness, love, and joy which she combines to explore growth, repair, movement, expansive views, and patching.

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In a new work for this show, placed in front of the long window Mum’s Liberty, honours my mother, Joan who passed away late last year. Over the last 10 years she declined after a fall, head injury, and Alzheimer’s disease. At her funeral, which was held not far from the gallery, and in the direction the work is placed, we had beautiful floral arrangements in Mum’s favourite colour yellow, complemented with various shades of orange. These colours also form the palette for the lower section the patchwork. The piece is made from a collection of special fabrics and worn clothing; including a couple of Mum’s favourite shirts, fabric from her wedding dress, raw silk pieces that she bought on a trip to India as a young woman, photos she took in her beloved garden on our farm that I had printed on silk, and lighter weight silk I botanically dyed with flowers and leaves from my neighbourhood and garden.

As I look around the space, installed with my artwork, I am constantly reminded of my Mum’s influence, her guidance in patiently teaching me to stitch at the kitchen table on the farm, I remember the exact moment, when I was about six, with a warm sunny feeling. She modelled how the rhythm of repetitive making can nourish and soothe. She also had a love of the natural world, which she nurtured in her garden on our mountain top, and initiated many a family bushwalk, trips to the high country, and beaches too.