Louise Meuwissen specialises in developing and delivering craft-based workshops that celebrate our innate creativity, wholeheartedly believing that making is for everyone. Louise works with people of all ages and abilities, in small and large groups, and facilitates spaces that are fun, encouraging, warm and relaxed.
She has delivered workshops with institutions such as The NGV, SIGNAL Arts, The Royal Melbourne Show, Craft Victoria, Wangaratta Art Gallery, Kingston Arts, Bunjil Place, and Bundoora Homestead Art Centre.
If you would like to discuss Louise hosting a workshop for your organisation or group, please be in touch via email, at louise.meuwissen@gmail.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Louise Meuwissen’s meticulously deliberate work is driven by a strong sense of history and craft processes. At the intersection of art, fashion and craft, she works with textiles and found materials to make intricate embroidered paintings, sculptures, installations, and adornment – collaborating with and transforming components of costume and dress into objects imbued with uncanny psychological and spiritual resonances. Considering fashion and dress as semantic device, her work employs DIY methodologies and craft techniques to blend post-consumer materials – high and low – with time, care, and attention to draw out their inherent social and political histories, and contemporary reverberations.
Meuwissen’s practice contemplates the complex individual and collective relationships we form with objects, and how they come to embody meaning and value; carry energetic, symbolic, and intellectual charge; and become anchors for thoughts and beliefs. Her work is informed by adornment and decoration, and the fluxing of fashion – underpinned by discarding and collecting, and the interplay between labour and luxury.
Recent bodies of work centre the restorative and healing capacity of craft-based practice for mental health – to process existential questions through creativity and artistic expression; to act as a conduit for deeply felt intra and inter-personal connection; and the creation of communal portals and spells through collective creative activities such as crafting, body adornment, dress, and dress up parties. These works examine the relationship between personal expression and escapism, questioning the boundaries of 'what is real, and what is make-believe?'
Meuwissen’s current research considers the psychology of belief, spiritual yearning complicated by material consumption, and the history of glamour. She is especially interested in the power of glamour, desire, aspiration and escapism, and how these are perpetuated and weaponised as tools of control. Her works consider the intangible, unknowable and mortality, and is grounded in environmental sustainability.