A fabric artist who made the Coast her adoptive home two decades ago has launched her first solo exhibition, depicting miniature signs of life and renewal that thrive in West Coast forests.
“I spend a lot of time in the forest exploring,” said Nell Burns, who opened her show Nurturing Growth during a public reception at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre on Oct. 11. “It’s a whole different landscape to what we have in the United Kingdom, and to me it still feels almost brand new.”
Many of Burns’s three-dimensional works are fashioned from stitched thread. She uses embroidery to make cloth with stitching, then manipulates the result into unique forms inspired by pods and cocoons.
In pieces like Inside Outside, her technique creates the illusion of unbroken organic growth: the polypore-like sculpture is suspended in mid-air, its tawny surface adorned with pastel-coloured carbuncles. Her Tree Clock, fashioned from felt and thread, houses a swinging pendulum in its hollow innards; hand-crafted greenery sprouts from its crown and roots.
Burns began her artistic practice as a dressmaker and creator of patterns but was determined from the start to eliminate an apparent necessity of fabric work: the seam.
“Whether your inspiration is a woodwork piece or a ceramic piece, they [woodworkers and ceramicists] can make it seamless,” she observed. “But with fabric, you can’t. That’s why I’ve developed this technique where it’s completely seamless. You don’t have to incorporate darts and I can still get curves and sculptures.” Darts are shape-making folds traditionally used in textile design.
Burns also weaves hidden meteorological and political messages into her works. The oversize pods of 2021 and 2022 use colours to represent the amount of regional rainfall over the respective years, with each two-millimeter ring of thread representing a single day.
Her Hanging by a Thread is a fabric representation of Earth’s continents, their countries demarcated in variegated shades of green linked across ocean voids by lilac threads. She designed the piece after hearing a distressing radio news report followed by a song titled “Out of Control.” “I just thought, oh my goodness, that’s exactly how I feel,” she recalled, “like we’re not in control of the world.”
The importance of planet-wide connections also appears in her deconstructed fabric globe, A New World (likewise inspired by another radio song of the same title). Its surface is peeled back, allowing visitors to deposit slips of paper inscribed with visions for a better future. Accordingly, the emerald continents on the azure background are arranged in an unfamiliar pattern, compelling viewers to re-imagine Earth’s surface.
“I’m hoping it’s going to be some kind of manifestation,” explained Burns. “I think this exhibit has to grow, and so maybe it will become a different type of interaction at the next show.”
The display of Burns’s works uses the architecture of the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre to advantage: her Moss and Lichen pieces are wound around wooden pillars. Her Cirque du Filament creations hover in mid-air, catching shafts of sunshine from the skylight above. The works are simultaneously otherworldly and familiar, as in Moss — a lichen-draped pod with proportions similar to an infant’s bassinet — or Bark Cocoon, whose supple maroon ripples exude nurturing warmth.
“It’s educational, but I try to create in fun and memorable ways,” said Burns, “to make people more mindful of what we have and how we need to look after it.”
Nurturing Growth by Nell Burns remains on display at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre until Nov. 9.
