Caro Pattle

About the work

Lucky Sticks presented at The Mixing Room Gallery

Lucky Sticks takes the divination rod as an object with which to explore the magnetism of matter. To create the work, I wove glass beads, copper wire and synthetic taffeta to encapsulate eucalyptus limbs in tactile skins. Using branches foraged in Naarm’s inner north following cataclysmic contact between a tree and a reversing car (not mine), I’ve crafted the fated intimate embrace of distinct materials – wood, glass and fabric.

While divination rods are purported to channel earthly vibrations in order to lead the rod’s bearer to precious matter, Lucky Sticks imagines a relationship between material that is dynamic, powerful and most of all, not subservient to humankind. Let’s imagine the fateful union of car and tree not as the result of a distracted driver, but of wood singing to metal and glass sparkling at leaves. The young eucalyptus cracking like a green apple bitten, and the branches shivering and whispering in the night sky.

 

Lodestar presented at the National Library of Australia

Devotedly hand woven of plush blue velvet, Lodestar is ostensibly a molten blue rock. The process of coil weaving enacts the slow accrual of geological stratum, amassing layer by layer. The work confuses divides that we might perceive to exist between the organic and inorganic, between the alive and the lifeless.

If we look to the future, what will our material legacies be? Will our inheritance be an anthropogenic dissolution of nature and culture, a white noise slurry of microplastics suspended in soil? With hubris, I imagine Lodestar emerging one thousand years hence from the desert sands, glowing and mysterious. Lodestar could be a waypoint, a singularity of matter, the declaration of a new post-human age.

Image credits to the artist

About the artist

Born 1985, Aotearoa (New Zealand). Naarm based since 2014.

Caro Pattle graduated from a Bachelor of Textiles at RMIT in 2019 with a previous Bachelor of Fine Arts completed in 2009. The recipient of several travel grants and industry prizes, she was named the Australian Textile Graduate of the Year by the Design Institute of Australia for 2020. Pattle’s work was presented by Craft at the 2022 & 2023 NGV Melbourne Design Fairs, and she has been selected to contribute to numerous group exhibitions nationally, including at the Australian Tapestry Workshop, the Jam Factory and FIN Gallery. In 2023, Pattle presented a commissioned work in Melbourne Now, Vessels at NGV Australia: Ian Potter Centre.