In these uncertain times you often have to dig deep to find beauty. So I was very lucky to simply stumble across some artworks that filled me with pure joy.
A visit to Hyphen: Wodonga Library Gallery is always stimulating and well worth the drive across the Murray. The unexpected delight is currently hung at the top of the sweeping staircase on the wall connecting the two main galleries.
Needle and Thread is an exhibition of the creations of the Albury Wodonga Branch of the Embroiderers Guild, Victoria, ranging through goldwork, blackwork, stumpwork, Brazilian embroidery, thread weaving, thread painting, canvas work, to abstract embroidery.
Some of the embroideries look like paintings, one is a stained-glass window when seen from a distance, one transports the imagination instantly to the Tudor Court. There are images of animals, birds, butterflies and flowers, as well as wider landscapes. Favourites changed with time and absorption – because of course I went back for a repeat viewing. Each is a thing of beauty. Today I overheard a father say to his young child with awe in his voice, ‘aren’t they gorgeous.’
The individual Guild members were given a chance to add a small biographical fragment about their introduction to needlework. There were different pathways to their obvious passion, whether taught by mothers, grandmothers, teachers, nuns at boarding school, or fellow embroiderers, at ages eight, twelve, in the teens, as adults, upon retirement.
The panels alongside the works also contain a description of the type of embroidery displayed. I was captured by the words. There is poetry in the language of embroidery, from the names of the techniques used (listed in the introduction to the exhibition above), to the names of the individual stitches: chain, drizzle, long and short, fly and herringbone, stem, satin stitch and French knots. A perfectly balanced sampler manages to introduce so many more: four-sided stitch, rice stitch, twisted ladder, knitting stitch, long arm cross, horizontal cross.
There is also plain old cross-stitch, something I was introduced to a school, though the efforts of my class never approached the fine evocation of a subject as Ann Wilkesmann’s ‘Green Apples.’
All this lovely fancy work… The hours involved must be phenomenal. And the eyesight.
The introductory panel to the exhibition mentions that this kind of work is ‘often viewed as decorative or domestic.’ Any residual arguments about a divide between art and traditional women’s crafts are surely buried by each and every work in Needle and Thread. They are indeed, ‘not only a skilled craft, but a medium for storytelling, personal expression and quiet contemplation.’
I walked away with a skip in my step.
If I was to give a star rating, it’d be Five Perfect Stitches
[These are ‘Inchies’ – some of the works a square inch in size to show diversity of styles used by the members of the Albury Wodonga Branch of the Embroiderers Guild, Victoria]
Needle and Thread
Hyphen: Wodonga Library Gallery
On until April 26, 2026
Riparian 