VCA ART 2021

Bettina Purdie

Bachelor of Fine Arts (Sculpture)

Utilising lenses of care and curiosity, this installation focuses on intergenerational knowledge and relationships through the exploration of domestic traditions and material transformations. Central to the installation, a suspended woollen blanket passed from my grandparents to my mother and now me, which I have been mending. I have been thinking about repair and repurposing as analogy for ideas around preserving and rewriting; stories in the material are cumulative and not erased but sometimes shifted through new understandings and perspectives. This renewed blanket holds space for a transformed porcelain blanket, once an object of comfort, now a fragile reminder of things longing for forgetting. On the wall a series of embroideries offer translations of fleeting moments, markers of future nostalgia, reflections of attentiveness to small gestures.

Bettina Purdie, Holding space for my fragile comforts, Porcelain, handed down wool blankets, cotton embroidery threads, polyester thread, bronze, collected objects, 2021.
Bettina Purdie, Holding space for my fragile comforts, Porcelain, handed down wool blankets, cotton embroidery threads, polyester thread, bronze, collected objects, 2021. Documentation by Claire Lambe.
Bettina Purdie, Holding space for my fragile comforts (detail), Porcelain, handed down wool blankets, cotton embroidery threads, polyester thread, bronze, collected objects, 2021.
Bettina Purdie, Holding space for my fragile comforts (ceramic blanket detail), Porcelain, handed down wool blankets, cotton embroidery threads, polyester thread, bronze, collected objects, 2021.
Bettina Purdie, Holding space for my fragile comforts (element view), Porcelain, bronze, 2021.
Bettina Purdie, Why did I do that?, Digital photograph of text, 2021.
Bettina Purdie, Holding space for my fragile comforts (detail), Porcelain, handed down wool blankets, cotton embroidery threads, polyester thread, bronze, collected objects, 2021.
Bettina Purdie, Translating Em: Happy (detail), Linen, cotton embroidery thread, gilded bamboo hoop, 2021.

We acknowledge and pay respect to the Traditional Owners of the lands upon which our campus is situated, the Boonwurrung and Woiwurrung people of the Kulin Nations, who have created art, made music and told their stories here for thousands of generations. We also acknowledge and extend our respect to the Traditional Owners of all lands on which our work is viewed, shared and enjoyed, and to all Elders, past, present and emerging.

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