PETA CARLIN

Contact

peta.carlin@rmit.edu.au

Peta Carlin is a Melbourne-based visual artist and researcher. Graduating from architecture, prior to undertaking an honours degree and a Masters degree in fine art imaging, her work explores architectural themes and concepts through the practices of image-making, and collaborative exchange. She is currently completing a PhD by Project at SIAL, entitled ‘On Semperian Surfaces: Interweavings between the Mid-Twentieth Century Curtain Wall and Harris Tweed, A Study Mediated by Photography’, which speculates on the nature of the surface and its contribution to our understanding and creation of place. She is the recipient of a British Council Design Researcher Award (2009) and the Lomo Australia Award for Most Innovative Use of Photomedia (2007).

Recalling the nineteenth century German architect and champion of the crafts Gottfried Semper’s claim that textiles are the true antecedents to the wall, On Semperian Surfaces is an interdisciplinary investigation that explores the relationship between the hand-crafted, geographically specific and culturally grounded fabric of Harris Tweed, hand-woven by islanders at their homes in the Outer Hebrides to this day, and the phenomenon of the mass-mediaised surface of the curtain glass wall that patterns our cities across the world. Premised upon interpretation, this research speculates on how allegiances between surfaces might contribute to our understanding of and creation of place, the hyphantic potential of the photograph put to work in its making.

Appropriating the productive art of weaving, On Semperian Surfaces stitches together a series of diptychs from disparate disciplines, architectural and textile, their conjoining founded upon association. The research departs from a series of photographs, Urban Fabric: Greige, seven portraits of Melbourne’s mid-twentieth century corporate architectural façades, which exposed the latent image of Harris Tweed amidst the buildings’ faces. Operating from the intimate to the architectural, shuttling betwixt body and building, between the rural and the metropolitan, from the hand-crafted to the mass-reproduced, the overarching approach is founded upon analogy, its binding establishing contexts, enabling surfaces to appear.

Analogy was a favoured mode of transition for the German scholar and writer Walter Benjamin, and it is through the lens of his writings that this research is largely read, the language of photography a salient and palpable feature of his texts. A constellation of other writers is gathered around this scrivener, art, architecture and textile historians, philosophers, including poets and novelists too, whose own works and threads of thought enrich the conceptual patterning while lending colour to the prose.

On Semperian Surfaces is composed of two parts, the first of which contains the images and artist statements, coupled by an essay which locates the work amidst a milieu of inspirations and associations, images lured to and emitted from Urban Fabric: Greige, including works by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Mel Bochner, Andreas Gursky, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Thomas Ruff, Anton Vidokle, and Allan Sekula, to name but a few, and which, in a sense, interweave to provide the score to which this text is set.

The second section is a response to the images in the Urban Fabric suite and their installation. Understood as image-texts, these writings do not seek to describe the work per se, but are presented as another form of transcription, elaborating on the relationships between some of the images that proliferated in the wake of Urban Fabric: Greige. In a series of essays dialogues thus ensue, each text elucidating different aspects, tied on, one after the other, like webs of tweed, and pulled through the loom.

As a result of this coursing, it is suggested that On Semperian Surfaces tenders a new surface vocabulary for the reading of the city, one that seeks to challenge the banality of the office tower whose façades were once decried as “anonymous,” while activating the unforeseen potential of Harris Tweed, the metaphoricity of the photograph brought to light in its construction.

Exhibitions

2012 – ‘On Semperian Surfaces’, Design Hub, RMIT University – solo -  (forthcoming)

2009 - ‘Urban Fabric: Swatch’ Craft Victoria - group

2007 – ‘William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize’, Monash Gallery of Art - group

2007 – ‘2007 Kodak Salon’, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne - group

2007 - ‘Urban Fabric: Greige’, West Space: Artist-Run-Initiative, Melbourne - solo

2007 ‘Urban Fabric: Looming’, SIAL Interactive Pavilion – Designex - group

2003 – ‘Nikon Summer Salon’, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne - group

2002 - ‘Corners’, De De Ce, Sydney - solo

2001 - ‘Corners’, Level 11 Gallery, Melbourne - solo

2000 - ‘Littoral’, Viscom Gallery, R.M.I.T., Melbourne - solo

2013 – ‘Fashioning a Shell’, BİLGİ University, Istanbul (forthcoming)

2011 – ‘Corporate Camouflage’ with Angharad Mclaren and Jason Nelson, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee

Publications

2011 - ‘Callum Morton:In Memoriam’(exhibition review), Architecture Australia November/December 2011

2011 - ‘Networks, Cells and Silos’ (exhibition review), Artlink, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2011

2011 - For What It’s Worth’ (exhibition review), Architecture Australia,  January/February 2011

2010 - ‘Urban Fabric: Orain Luiadh’ Craft Victoria, Fortieth Anniversary Essay

2009 - Guest editor and contributor, Architect Victoria – Architecture and Photography

2009 – ‘Harris Tweed, Craft Life

2008 - ‘Or Whatever Floats Your Boat’, Para: RMIT Design Theses 06/07, ed. Leanne Zilka (Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2008)

2006 - Studies for ‘Urban Fabric’ included as end pages. In Marika Neustupny, Curtain Call: Melbourne's Mid-Century Curtain Walls (Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2006)

2006 - ‘Men in Black’ and ‘Empires, Ruins and Networks’ (book review), Un Magazine #7

2005 - ‘Bearth and Deplazes’, AR Architecture Review, No. 94

2005 – ‘Arresting the Developing Surface: Photographic Representations and Transformations of Architecture’, Masters Thesis (Melbourne: RMIT University, 2005)

2005 – ‘Publishing: The Craft of The Book and Other Art-Based Practices, Craft Culture

2001Corners, Exhibition Catalogue with an essay by Adrian Martin

1999 - Australian Embassies: An Overview’, Backlogue: Journal of the Half-Time Club

1994 - ‘The Kronborg Clinic: A Dionysian Disco in the Netherworlds, Transition 44 / 45

Urban Fabric: Greige Press Release

Urban Fabric: Greige and the Scottish-Gaelic Choir of Victoria

Urban Fabric: Greige Calendar of Participation