Combine shopping and art in Ararat

Ararat district people making the most of bargains in the heart of the rural city have expanding opportunities to also soak up art and culture while shopping.

Ararat Gallery Textile Art Museum Australia, TAMA, a focal point for the arts in Ararat and part of the central business district, represents an added incentive for people to explore shops and attractions.

Internationally renowned, TAMA consistently presents unique and intriguing exhibitions and opens from 10am to 4pm, every day of the week.

The latest exhibition is no exception. A largescale suspended sculpture made of more than 30 nightgowns and slip dresses – which people can walk through and touch – is the centrepiece of ‘Fantasies’.

Fantasies, by Melbourne artist Hannah Gartside, opened on July 20 and runs until October 20.

It will feature as a satellite program for the 2019 Craft Cubed Festival, run by Craft Victoria from August 1 to 31.

Gartside presented an artist talk during the exhibition opening, as well as two ‘upcycled fashion’ workshops, one for school groups and one for the general public, both focusing on teaching practical skills of hand and machine sewing.

Gartside said Fantasies was an ongoing suite of sculptural works which engaged the ‘materiality’ and embedded memories of ‘found’ undergarments and sleepwear to convey both ‘the strangeness of being in a body as well as a curiosity for, and delight in, new sensations’.

The sculptures use traditional quilting and dress-making techniques, which draw from Gartside’s training first in fashion then through her work as a classical-ballet costume maker.

Through transforming the pastel-coloured synthetic nightie, a well-known and outdated piece of clothing, the artworks in Fantasies seek to bring the viewer into a space of ‘sensual delight and wonder’.

“The nightie is an object that’s been eroticised through popular culture since the 1950s but is also attached to the Riot grrrl feminist punk movement of the 1990s – it functions as both a symbol of female agency and a connection back in time,” Gartside said.

“Fantasies seems to be haunted by all these associations – the implicated body becomes a phantom, or ghost, contained in the fabric.

“The shredded skirts in ‘The Sleepover’ piece create columns-portals of colour, which are disrupted and dissolve into one another as the viewer walks through the sculpture, their face caressed by lace hems.”