Fabric figures on show at art gallery

Press, 21 November 1987, Page 6

Fabric figures on show at art gallery

By KAY FORRESTER If Vai Griffith Jones ever runs away from home, she will do it on a motor-cycle, wearing sensible socks and blue silk knickers, carrying a box of essentials. At least that is how she has portrayed herself running away in a fabric sculpture on show at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery next week. The motor-cycle is one of about 25 fabric figures in her “Stuffing On” exhibition. The figure is appropriately called “Stuffing Off." She began planning her own fabric exhibition after the successful "Stuffed Stuff’ exhibition last year. She was one of the group of woman who staged that touring show. Delighted as she is that the funny, stuffed figures brought hundreds of people to the gallery, she quickly points out that her characters have a message. They are not just for fun.

Her themes are motherhood, maidens, marriage, and men, and the message Is often cynical. Vai Griffith Jones says she is a feminist artist. She believes she has the skills for fabric sculpture. “I’m using traditional skills of home making,” she says. The stuffed figures are often depictions of herself or people she knows: “Hot Stuff’ is a hot tub full of naked women. "Naked in the tub together, there is no pretence,” she says. “The observer is the intruder ... Pubic hair is made of pot scrubbers. For me this recalls domestic obligations and enforces the fact that men would not be welcome here today.” Her mother Is portrayed in a work basketcum nest figure, her lips sewn shut. “My mother was a serious and skilled homemaker ... She could not speak out or change the dreary monotony of her days.”

She says the ideas for works, all of which are for sale, come from her own experience and others’.

A South Island tour is planned for the exhibition after it closes at the McDougall on January 13. Vai Griffith Jones hopes to Tour the show round North Island centres also.

A complementary exhibition is Malcolm Harrison’s “The Family" exhibition of doll figures from an imaginary black American family. That exhibition also opens on Monday.

The gallery will ask those attending these exhibitions to make a donation towards the Art Annex project of extra exhibition space in a renovated Centre Gallery at the Christchurch Arts Centre. The Lottery Board approved $30,000 towards the project if the gallery can raise the rest of the $lOO,OOO needed.