The exhibition “What’s the Haps?” follows the happenings of artist Clementine Belle McIntosh’s hometown Gilgandra NSW – the waterhole meeting place of the Wiradjuri, Wailwan and Kamilaroi peoples. McIntosh investigates the ways in which her rural context connects and engages with her localised artmaking practice in collaborative mark-making techniques. Acts of care are coupled with acts of aggression as found, gifted and secondhand fibres are stained, shot at, buried, bandaged, soaked, sewn and embellished. The material bodies of the textile-based works become a palimpsest of accepted dualisms in town (human/nonhuman, female/male, stranger/local, townie/cockies etc) defining the individual’s identity and sense of place. In the gallery, textiles suspend and drape from the hardwood beams as curtains would cover a window, framing or partially veiling the neighbouring work.
In these approaches, the artist queries the intimacy one can hold for a familiar place and how that intimacy might be felt. Like small town gossip, sharing a drink or a bed, anonymity and privacy is a rarity the more enmeshed a community is. Closing curtains becomes a pointless exercise. In these abracted forms, the artist comes to terms with these realities in a place laden with personal lived-experience and stored family histories.
