Haydens is pleased to present Colour Ways, Jacqueline Stojanović’s highly anticipated second solo show with the gallery. In this exhibition, three significant bodies of work are brought together in a proliferating grid of colour. An experimental, mural-scaled tapestry is shown alongside wooden mosaics and graph paper drawings, providing the artist with the opportunity to contextualise various longstanding elements of her material practice.

A colourway is a term ordinarily used within a design context to refer to the available arrangements of colour for a particular design. When considered in relation to this exhibition, the term also conveys a sense of the expansive nature of the act of arrangement. Stojanović intuitively draws together divergent concepts, materials, and processes as though they are colours in a colourway.

At the centre of the exhibition is Adria, an epic composition of coloured wool on steel gridded panels. Over the course of many months, threads of wool are hand-wound and sutured to the galvanised steel structures, highlighting the artist’s adept use of colour with a rigid, flashing edge. Stojanović’s respect for traditional weaving processes is counterbalanced by the innovative techniques of combining these contradictory aesthetics. Allusions to the slowness of weaving are contrasted by the immediacy of utilising the gridded found object. Describing the way in which she arranges the colours in this work, the artist explains “There is a wayfinding nature to the process; the final result or destination remains a surprise, even to me.” Through this method, Adria demonstrates a responsive way of making, whereby each colour choice informs the next, creating gradual shifts in hue that represents moving through time.

Bringing together contrasting ideas in cohesive but varied forms, the artworks presented in Colour Ways exemplify the artists ongoing engagement in abstraction, and how the arrangement of colour speaks to an understanding of wayfinding. By visualising the relationships in her aesthetic language, Stojanović lays out a vivid pathway of threads to follow, allowing us to experience a poetic unravelling of her process.

This exhibition is part of The National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Design Week 2024 program.

Jacqueline Stojanović is a multidisciplinary artist living and working on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the eastern Kulin Nation. She is an artist, weaver and educator who works with historic and contemporary textile processes. The impetus of Stojanović’s expanded practice is grafted to her belief in weaving as an ancient carrier of culture. She continues the tradition of hand weaving within a contemporary framework to memorialise the cultural practice of her parents respective homelands in former-Yugoslavia and Vietnam. Her works borrow the vocabulary of Abstraction and assemble a host of materials from the industrial to the domestic, collaging time scapes, memories, translations, built environments, and folk traditions, to navigate shifts in collective social and material values, past and present.

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