Over Time: a retrospective exhibition
by Nancy Tingey
I would like to thank several people this afternoon:
• Tevor Heidt, Board Chair, Strathnairn Arts
• the wonderful Strathnairn Arts staff who helped make the our installation experience such a positive one: Di Libke, Wendy Dawes and Gemma Brown.
• exhibition installation helpers Domino, Seth and Peta
• and of course, Gabriella Hegyes whose practiced eye and creative skills contributed greatly to the exhibition taking shape.
It has been a privilege to work with Nancy Tingey to help her realise this retrospective.
She and I began working on the broad strokes of the show mid-2023. In January of this year I travelled to meet with Nancy, and we visited the Woolshed to view the space and envision possibilities. I took numerous photos to help me later when later on when I created the layout plan for the show in the Woolshed’s unique environment. I thought how appropriate for Nancy to have her retrospective at Strathnairn, where she had had a studio for 15 years.
Over the next 6 months I made several trips to work with Nancy, going through her extensive archives of journal articles, reviews, interviews, exhibition catalogues and artist journals. We began to gather artworks from different time periods of her life, checking the condition of several pieces, getting works reframed, newly matted, with some textile works needing repair. We also began to contact those who had purchased certain significant pieces to ask if they might be willing to loan them for the show. All kindly agreed.
My role was to listen, glean and assemble representative markers of Nancy’s oeuvre to showcase the type of works for which Nancy is recognised, but also bring to light works which would be unknown to most.
Rather than go through each section of the exhibition in my remarks, I will leave it to you, the viewer, to wander through and absorb what you wish to. The text panels provide background and context for sections of the show, and hopefully insight into the continuing threads that run through Nancy’s creative life.
To my mind, these threads have been:
1) The importance of foundation.
Nancy was trained in the Developing Process by Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore in the 1960s in the UK, and influenced by abstract art and the nature of materials.
2) The importance of line and landscape.
· experienced through walking the Cumbrian Hills and Lake District with her father
· mapping the terrain both literally and in abstracted form in stained glass, assemblage and textiles
3) In tandem with all, has been the examination and the search for expression for the migrant experience
• the existence in two worlds
• ties—renewing—loosening—reframing—reforming
• yearnings
• loss
• reconciling
• joy
All have been consistent considerations throughout her oeuvre.
In a recent essay in Art Monthly Australasia, Winter 2024 by Anne Brennan, Julie Ewington and Blake Griffiths about why textiles are so visible in contemporary cultural conversations, they refer to Chloe Wolfson who states:
“…cloth’s implication in every aspect of human experience, and its profound significance across cultures, has become a vehicle for invoking memory, shared experience and narrative.”
Throughout my time working with Nancy on her exhibition I have been reminded of a saying in Tewa, a language spoken by several Pueblo nations in the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico and Arizona, that explains that there is no word for “artist“ in their language. Instead, they say “one has an artful life”.
This encompasses the whole of being for that person—their outlook—their way of walking in this world.
This became the underpinning for Over Time … to express the artful life that Nancy has led.
In closing, I found it significant that Nancy’s final work for the exhibition is “Over Flow”—a delicate work—metaphorical on so many levels—that brings together natural materials of personal importance to her, connected by thread—that ever-present line that Nancy has reflected upon and responded to for over 60 years.
