DOMAIN ROAD & ENVIRONS: A DISTANCED VIEW, 1986-87
NARELLE JUBELIN
panel 2 of 7 from Remembrance of things past lays bare the plans for destiny, 1986-87
cotton petit point embroidery on silk mesh, and hand-cut wood-veneer panel mount in a found English cedar frame
21.5 x 100.5 cm
signed, dated and inscribed verso: "The Domain Rd & environs; a distanced view" / "Marks on the Land" series / Narelle Jubelin 1987
Mori Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney
Remembrance of things past lays bare the plans for destiny, Avago Gallery Window, Sydney, 1986
Selected Affinities, Jam Factory, Adelaide, 1987
Narelle Jubelin: Trade Delivers People, Aperto, Venice Biennale, Venice, 1990
Doubletake: Collective Memory and Current Art, Hayward Gallery, London, 1992; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 1993
Colonial Post Colonial, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 1996
Narelle Jubelin: Vision in Motion, University of Sydney Art Gallery, Sydney, 7 January – 30 March 2012; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 24 April – 7 July 2012; Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide, 19 July – 27 September 2013 (label attached verso)
Hanna, B.,'The Subversive Stitch, two recent exhibitions by Narelle Jubelin', Transition, May 1987, p. 28
Kerr, J.,'Re-making Hi(s)story, Narelle Jubelin's recent work', Artlink, vol. 8, no. 3, 1988, p. 29
Johnson, V., Narelle Jubelin: Trade Delivers People: Aperto, La Biennale di Venezia, 1990, Mori Gallery, Sydney, 1990, pl. 11 (illus.)
Cooke, L., Curiger, B., and Hilty, G., Doubletake: Collective Memory and Current Art, South Bank Centre, London and Parkett Verlag AG, Zurich, 1993, pp. 164–165 (illus.)
Delany, M.,'Fabrication and Frame: Narelle Jubelin and the Colonial Panorama', in Engberg, J., (ed.), Colonial Post Colonial, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 1996
Stephen, A.,'Losers, Weepers: Narelle Jubelin's Museum Work', in Holder, J., and Kerr, J., (eds), Past Present: The National Women's Art Anthology, Sydney, Craftsman House, 1999
Stephen, A., Parker, L., and Redgate, J., Narelle Jubelin: Vision in Motion, University Art Gallery, University of Sydney, Sydney, 2012, p. 66
Rozsika Parker opens The Subversive Stitch with a quote from Olive Schreiner:
'Has the pen or pencil dipped so deep in the blood of the human race as the needle?'1
Parker continues that, in her opinion, 'The answer is, quite simply, no. The art of embroidery has been the means of educating women into the feminine ideal, and of proving that they have attained it, but it has also provided a weapon of resistance to the constraints of femininity'.2
The history of needlework is then today recounted as a history of the oppressed and limited lives of women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but one also of rebellion, resistance and protest.3
Narelle Jubelin's petit point is most certainly the latter - a second-wave feminist and post-colonial act of protest in one-point stitching.
Domain Road & Environs: A Distanced View is panel two in a septych, Remembrance of things past lays bare the plans for destiny, an assembled panorama of monuments and landmarks from Sydney to Adelaide, from one beaming lighthouse (Sydney Heads) to another (Port Adelaide), and moves through day and night; through sensational sunrises and soaring technicolour sunsets into bright, moonlit skies.
In 170 stitches to the square centimetre, this panel, the largest of the seven, stretches left to right across a series of monuments and landmarks in Sydney, from Mrs Macquarie's Chair to the Federation Obelisk in Centennial Parklands.4
Each element of Domain Road unites in Jubelin's protest against the phallic structures of the colonial European patriarchy, remaking the inhabited land in its own glorified image. As art and architecture historian Joan Kerr wrote shortly after the first exhibition of Domain Road, 'Jubelin appears to have found a splendid visual solution to such apparent obstacles as the fact that feminising is normally read as trivialising or marginalising. For her, the trivial and marginal become strengths that allow her to bounce these terms back on to the original image ... Her artworks make the monuments and views of men into "exquisitely precious little things", charming but ultimately futile exercises of phallocentric power, subordinate to the forms and colours of apocalyptic nature.'5
1. Schreiner, O., quoted in Parker, R., The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, Women's Press, London, 1984, p. ix
2. Parker, R., The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, Women's Press, London, 1984, p. ix
3. Wood Conroy, D., 'An archaeology of tapestry: contexts, signs and histories of contemporary practice', PhD thesis, Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, New South Wales, 1995, p. 209
4. Hanna, B., 'The Subversive Stitch, two recent exhibitions by Narelle Jubelin', Transition, May 1987, p. 28
5. Kerr, J., 'Re-making Hi(s)story, Narelle Jubelin's recent work', Artlink, vol. 8, no. 3, 1988, p. 30
HARRIET FLAVEL