Research Interests - Maxine Bristow

General research concerns are with the ‘expanded field’ of textile practice and the practical and theoretical perspectives that are generated through the positioning of textile materials and processes within the broader realm of contemporary visual culture.

Individual practice harnesses the processes, materials and accompanying discourses of needlework/plain-sewing within the conventions of a minimalist aesthetic. The research exploits the historical, cultural and critical contexts of both of these codes of practice, but through a process of exchange, aims to subvert or transcend their conventional definitions of meaning. The research is generally manifest in textile objects and installations.

The work strategically adopts the formal autonomous language of modernism and in a way re-enacts a silencing of the subjective narratives that surround textile production, but with the intention that through this silencing it becomes all the more articulate. The work is rational, systematic, and on the one hand aims to deny any emotional engagement; yet it departs from Minimalist concerns as any attempt at rational coherence and neutrality is continually disrupted by the somatic sensuality and psychological potential of cloth, and by the social and historical connotations of the needlework techniques employed in its production.
The research to date has been manifest in two broad but related bodies of work. Since 1997, the cloth constructed bag form and bound buttonhole have developed as signature motifs. Adopting a rectilinear format and viewed frontally, these quilted bag forms occupy a hybrid state between the utilitarian textile object, sculpture and painting.
More recent work extends ideas around tactility and the significance of the body to aesthetic experience, to a broader interest in our physical engagement with space and in particular the role of cloth in mediating this experience. The work focuses on features of the built environment with which we have an actual physical though often unconscious bodily relationship and which instigate in us routinely repeated patterns of behaviour. Such features often go unnoticed but are nevertheless crucial to the functioning of space and are significant in that they often define boundaries, marking a transition between different realms of space. The patterns of behaviour instigated in such features of the environment are echoed in the work through the repetitive processes employed in its production which bring both a private and a feminine intervention into the public realm of architectural space. The work is informed by critical and contextual research surrounding minimalism and monochrome painting, tactility, materiality and the body, and the ‘poetics’ and the ‘politics’ of space.

Potential Doctoral Proposals

I would be interested supervising primarily practice-based doctoral students in any of the above or the following areas:

• Contemporary fine art practice with either a discipline or interdisciplinary focus in: textiles, painting, sculpture.
• Contemporary theoretical and critical debates in textiles