A handful of chillies
Here, held closely, within this humblest of cloths - his hanky. Unfolded with care, a handful of chillies comes spilling out. This spilling of bright fruits as a spilling of stories that unravel at once deeply personal and universally shared experience is allegorical of Michele Elliot’s practice and is at the heart of her solo exhibition what is held, is here at Wollongong Art Gallery. The heartfelt quality of each work lingers long after it is seen and its resonance is in the way it gently takes us in. Every work has a story. Mostly, the story begins with some small detail, like this memory of a habit of the artist’s father, to carry chillies with his handkerchief when going out - just in case his meals required spicing. A scrap of memory in a small old cloth, held closely, until it was remade by a daughter. Stories of objects, characters and transformation are a wondrous feature of Elliot’s unique artmaking processes in which the end is never known, or even foreseen, at the beginning. And this is how the best stories are told.
Image: Michele Eliot what is held, is here installation view; showing left to right variants and the garden, 2024, gifted linen, cotton thread, blackbutt wood (Euc. Pilularis) and column (blue) 2024, cotton sheets, indigo, 70x320cm. Photo: Silversalt Photography.
Handkerchiefs as objects, Michele says, are rather mundane. Typically, a hemmed square of lightweight cotton weave, machine manufactured in familiar inoHensive shades of plaid, tartan or check, they are made to absorb and wipe away what is to be human. They absorb what we leak, keep us clean and comforted – a functional cloth.