Pam Gaunt acknowledges an artistic lineage in the textile tradition, although produces work that resists the limits of such classification. If her art was to be defined it would preferably be by concept rather than medium. Her primary concerns are with ornamentation and transformation and her work appropriately skirts around fashion, design, art and architecture. She is interested in challenging the superficial role bestowed upon embellishment or the concealing of foundations. Her work approximates the borders, margins and friezes of built form or book and manuscript design, or the seams, facings and labels of garments. Gaunt's work consciously privileges the material and the decorative, thereby subverting or reversing their perceived roles or marginalised position. Her predilection for incorporating found or personal items and readily available, commercially produced materials serves to advance her transgressions of convention.

Recent work has been characterised by the prescribed arrangement of multiple elements. The elements have been ordered to operate illusionistically from a distant perspective and by providing intimate revelations from close scrutiny. Such installations have connected with the scale and detail of the exhibition site, by suggesting or accentuating architectural tracery, charting spatial volume or elevating legends or diagrammatic pattern instructions to art form. In the exhibitions Marginalia in PICA in 1996 and Patterning the Edge at Craft Victoria in 1998, the walls were punctuated with patterns of shaped and printed balsa wood. The myriad components being repositories of decipherable clues hinting at and pointing to further contiguities for the whole exhibition. Meticulous and layered placement of items such as hooks and eyes, zips, thread, lace, photographs, momentos and personal items such as pills have brought a popular and diaristic quality to the work.

Gaunt has found decorative and associational possibilities in systems and symbols in a way that is similar to the interest in serial permutations for Minimalists. By contrast though, her work has been dependent upon high level intervention, ornamentation and narrative. A studio residency in Milan in 1997, focussed Gaunt's attention upon the impact of architectural decoration and mosaic, and heightened her interest in spatial relationships and confrontations. This experience informed Moth-eaten at the Object Gallery in Sydney early in 1999 where the floor was 'tiled' with an ordered array of printed metal plates which cleverly referenced the Customs House heritage of Object Gallery through transcribing original Custom's Department at the edge the work.

The newest work for this Galerie Düsseldorf exhibition continues within this context. It is distinguished, however, by a liberated reductiveness. The obsessive accretions of earlier work have yielded to a simplification that sees two dimensional planes encoded with stratas of meaning via printing and fragmentation, and fabric that has experienced limited processing. Additionally, in this exhibition, cloth and metal installations are combined to bring dramatic oppositions within the space and within the works themselves. The aluminium is manipulated to appear like pleated fabric or paper and the real cloth is made solid and inert by being bundled and tied or rolled, and waxed. The effective evocations of movement, energy and dimension is therefore reliant upon placement, lighting and illusion, underlining the evolvement of Gaunt's interest in spatial order and control and its powers of transformation. She has confidently asserted her own artifice on space.

Gaunt draws upon eclectic cultural origins and centuries of design history in shaping her work, yet manages to deploy a sense of familiarity. She creates a juncture between accessibility and destablization. In the new work this has been achieved by the use of inexpensive wall paper and lace stencilling that features motifs commonly and commercially reproduced. The pink hue of the wallpaper, for example, seems simultaneously reminiscent of 1950s laminex tables or laminates and tones of elite nineteenth century Victorian design. The industrial aluminium treated in brilliant colour exudes the pleasure of foil gift wrapping yet the sensation is restrained by the segmented, deliberate rythmns of the overall form. The aluminium that carries muted colourings looks more like origami paper. The rolled cloth become markers fixed on a map denying the natural fluidity of fabric and the flourish of radiating bundles appear organic or painterly despite their static form.

This exhibition serves to emphasise Gaunt's convictions of the universality of pattern and the dilution of the divides between high and low art forms, making and artifice, and production and the precious. It sustains her attentiveness to the narrative, atavistic and transformative potential of material and design.

Margaret Moore

November 1999