Figure/Ground: The Art of Jemima Wyman, by Professor Jenni Sorkin

Figure/Ground is one of the tenets of Jemima Wyman’s pattern-intensive artistic practice. She uses repeat imagery to highlight our world in crisis through a commitment to showcasing and documenting global representations of mass protest and resistance as a means of commenting on ideas of liberation, freedom, propaganda, and the clear, but often forgotten, ways that textiles are key sites of communication as complex markers of identity, messaging, and concealment. In two-dimensional mediums such as painting and photography, the historic separation between figure and ground can often be located by finding the horizon line, for instance, in a landscape. Figure need not refer only to a human subject; it can be any object set in the foreground, or front, of the composition. Ground refers to the middle or back of the composition, hence the terms middle ground or background. In her installations, textiles, and surface designs, Wyman collapses the figure/ ground binary. That is, her images are impossible to localise, identify, or fully understand. They both offer and withhold information by transforming a real-world image—a woman in a pink balaclava, for instance, translated into an infinitely repeatable likeness. Such iconography is strategic; a mirroring of digital media’s omnipresence in our lives, and the endless possibilities of changing, pirating, capturing, forwarding, and otherwise altering the photograph, remaking it into something other than for its intended use. Filtered through the seemingly benign world of domestic furnishing, her installations and photo collages utilise the textile as an architectonic building block, embracing propaganda imagery advertised on t-shirts, bandanas and face masks to create two-dimensional works as well as curtains, drapes, swatches, costumes, and wallpaper that cover over every available surface, including floors and ceilings. Wyman’s exhibition ‘Crisis Patterns’ at Artspace Mackay showcases the abundance of her surface designs and the potency of their political charge. Wyman is one of Mackay’s most famous living artists, born in Sydney, she is a palawa woman, the Indigenous people of Tasmania, and currently lives and works between Brisbane/Meanjin and Los Angeles. She attended Queensland University of Technology (QUT), where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (in Visual Arts) with Honours, and was awarded the prestigious Samstag Fellowship which enables Australian artists to develop their artistic capacities and skills through a dedicated period of practice-based learning abroad. This was how Wyman arrived in Los Angeles—to attend the renowned California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), from which she JENNI SORKIN 3 graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 2007. Like many CalArts graduates, she remained in Los Angeles, pursuing social practice projects in tandem with artist Anna Mayer. Together, they formed the duo CamLab, and engaged in textile-driven performance projects (2005-present), employing architectonic principles, as well as making and performing in camouflage costumes; creating tented structures out of thrift store clothing for the public; and marking the location of a storefront gallery using an expansive turquoise fabric and creating programming beneath it. In this decade-plus of collaborative experimentation, Wyman pursued ideas of hiding in plain sight, disappearance and forgetting, and presumptions of violence against women. As CamLab’s program matured, they made education a central attribute of their content; focusing on re-learning forgotten feminist histories and employing activist strategies in public spaces. Fabric became a primary component of these performances; a ground upon which protagonists, or figures—students, viewers, the artists themselves—were activated, ignited physically and metaphorically, a relic of the performance, super-charged by the ritual of community-building. In pursuing a solo practice, Wyman embraced many of these same tactics, using fabric transfer techniques both literally and metaphorically. Much of her work is now rooted in photography, making use of found digital imagery, but built up into an extravaganza of colour and highly detailed surfaces; hand-cutting and placing the found images in a pattern that is reminiscent of textile-based piecework, accruing thousands of images to create a single artwork that reads as a seamless construction. Such an image becomes a metaphor of a crowd itself, the mob of faces that meld into a robust chant, or mass forward movement, pushing, in order to work collectively toward some ideal of progress. Propaganda textiles 2014-2017 was inspired by early 20th century Russian Revolution-era textiles, such as those by Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova. In this work, Wyman created a swatch book that parodies the ubiquitous design store samplers on offer that delight home décor consumers with the touch and feel of upholstery fabrics, wallpapers, surface finishes, in an array of colours and styles. The Pantone color chart is perhaps one of the best known examples. Traditionally imbued with seductive descriptors, swatches often use colour to evoke luxury and wealth, pointing to aspirational destinations such as Capri or Tahitian blue, or upscale edibles, such as ‘oyster’ or ‘sangria’. In her version, Wyman flips this on its head, also evoking place names— Bubble Gum United States of America 08-13; Lemon India 04-14; Sunrise Mexico 10-14—but with a caveat; these are locations and dates that highlight oppressive politics and state-sponsored violence. In Bubble Gum… for instance, a woman of colour in sunglasses and a multihued headscarf is placed at the centre of round pastels balls, turned topsy turvy in various directions, which are interspersed with smaller colourful spheres, all set against a black background. The fabric is a heavy cotton twill, a diagonal weave used for work pants, jackets, drapes, and blinds. Mimicking the candy confection ofa gumball machine, the site Wyman highlights is an emergency protest in Washington D.C. from August 2013, opposing the sentencing of Private Chelsea Manning, the U.S. Army soldier who was court-martialed and subsequently imprisoned for violating the U.S. Espionage Act for leaking covert documents related to the Iraqi War publicly on WikiLeaks, an open access forum. Lemon India… is a vertically oriented swatch; hand-drawn stripes of gold, canary, green, and aqua are interspersed with groupings of five and three people, all obscuring their identity with Narendra Modi masks at a rally in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. A far-right politician, Modi remains the current Prime Minister of India, who was first elected in 2014, the year that the protest swatch documents. The fabric on which the images are printed is a lightweight polyester, Poly Crepe de Chine, that retains vibrant colours, but is wrinkle-free and delicate, often used in the international garment industry for women’s wear, including blouses and dresses, many of which are manufactured in India and nearby Bangladesh. The Propaganda textiles swatch book documents protests taking place at sites globally from 2004 to 2017. The topics vary widely, but all fall into the categories of ‘for’ and ‘against’; protests on behalf of the rights of LGBTQIA+ people, political prisoners such as the Russian band Pussy Riot, kidnapped students in Mexico and Nigeria, survivors of statesponsored violence. Then there are the ‘against’ protests; anti-police brutality, anti-racism, anti-capitalism, anti-nuclear energy, anti-rape, and anti-government. Textiles also have the capacity to become a visual block, banner, or barrier themselves; enveloping, protecting, framing, or defining a particular cause or aiding those mounting it. Wyman’s collection of images within the swatch book are used, in turn, to produce bolts of fabric that become the basis for not only her own textile installations, but also as a reference archive—a way to document, track, and honour the ephemerality of protest culture, through a MAS-archive (her image archive system), a digitisation project that is formally included in the back of the swatch book, but also represents a commitment to an ongoing, continuous, and living collection. As Wyman writes, “The archive has developed in tandem with the protest culture growing globally, especially over the last few years. Since 2008, I have curated the archive in the creation of sculptures, wall works, paintings, wallpapers, collages and artist pages for print magazines”.1 These large scale wallpapers, paintings, collages, and wall works function as a ‘collective skin’, to use Wyman’s own terminology, creating a layered, and embodied knowledge that is built up over time in order to offer an overarching worldview, one in which resistance becomes a force agitating for peaceful change. While the swatches often single out lone protesters, offering the fabric translation of a photographic snippet, the overall effect is one that amplifies the solitary voice through repeat patterning. Repeat, repetition, recurrence, reverberation; the persistence of protest is a means of showcasing its omnipresence in the world, and the lone protester, covered in a headscarf, balaclava, or face mask, is a way to obscure one’s gender, racial and social identities, thus thwarting the possibility of identification and discovery.  Serial protesters often dress in camouflage to evade facial recognition software that is routinely used to scan crowded plazas and public squares by government agents and security police, most profoundly in nations where there is not only no guaranteed freedom of speech but further, a deep threat of punishment, torture, jail, and potentially even death. The risks that many protesters take is profound; Wyman is both honouring this peril, but also simply documenting the sheer populism of demonstrations. Wyman’s replication of the protesters themselves doubles and triples the profound imminence of risk and personal peril, reiterating, again and again, the broken social contract between citizen and state; danger compounded by lack of privacy, again a reiteration of figure/ground. This collapse underscores the instability between protesters—as both figures and figureheads, and their stubborn unwillingness to give up ground. Resistance is also a form of embodied knowledge within textile history. Resistdyeing is a traditional way of creating patterning, a method used to prevent, or ‘resist’ colour in designated areas of the cloth before dyeing. Wax-resist is the formal term for batik, in which an area of fabric is blocked out with wax, or tiedye bound with string or elastic. Within protest culture, urban geography often dictates designated areas of resistance or protection—zones of protest cordoned off through barricades, orange cones, or more violent deterrents, such as the threat of tear gas or rubber bullets. But such spaces are only possible in nations with free speech and the right to protest. This is far from a worldwide phenomenon. The specificity of an area of resistance becomes then a parallel ideology to Wyman’s propaganda textiles, sharply delineating nations where free speech is allowed, and where it is not. More recently, Wyman has further abstracted her imagery into amorphous clouds of colour, such as in Plume 1… 2019 and Haze 1… 2020. Trapped within the frame, the smoke rises from the bottom—a torrent of motion attached to an unseen source, yet extensively recorded in the extended work titles. Each severed image, no matter how abstract, represents extensive documentation of a protest site, such as in Plume 1…, the white smoke signals a police presence; tear gas, or stink bombs to force a crowd to disperse, while Wyman recounts that sometimes a particular cause or movement will select a colour to represent themselves, their flares a signature hue such as purple or blue. Smoke plumes from burning tyres further transform Wyman’s imagery of figure/ground into a broader iconography of dissent, one in which anger, violence, and disaster become beautiful but also melancholic, windswept like a tornado. Wyman accumulates her source materials, each collaged segment representing a distinctive source, and accrued into a colourful whole. These hand-cut digital photo collages are torn between the beauty of their unique hand-rendering, and the destructive energy they represent. Even the so-called righteous causes create an enormous amount of pollution, wreaking havoc on the lungs of protesters, police, bystanders, and community members alike, not to mention the piles of garbage and detritus left behind. As the feminist artist Mierles Laderman Ukeles wrote, in her famed ‘Maintenance Art Manifesto’ (1969), ‘…after the revolution, who is going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?’  Tornado-like in their movement, Wyman’s smoke collages are a record of the ever-present dark side of revolutionary activities. Wyman’s work, as a whole, becomes a way to think through the evolution of protest, community, and most crucially, dissent; what opposition and disagreement look like, how social change is effected, and textiles as an age-old record keeper, updated for our digital moment, but proof of an animated and portable architecture that enables the capacity for human engagement.

Jenni Sorkin is Professor and Chair of History of Art & Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She writes on the intersections between gender, material culture, and contemporary art, working primarily on women artists and underrepresented media.