ALUN LEACH-JONES & THE AUSTRALIAN TAPESTRY WORKSHOP EXHIBITION REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER HEATHCOTE

Mixing prints with paintings and tapestry, Nicholas Thompson Gallery presents a very tasty show of mid-career work by Alun Leach-Jones (1937-2017). The focus is a 1988 tapestry Revisited Objects which is flanked by the screenprint which it was developed from, and small woven preparatory test samples. Its worth visiting the show just for the opportunity to inspect this stately tapestry close up, and see exactly why the Victorian Tapestry Workshop is so respected internationally.

With the original composition interlocking forms were surrounded by a thin Manganese blue line and sat within a Cobalt blue surround, although in the subsequent tapestry these were converted into shades of episcopal purple. In the gallery you not only get to study those and other changes made by weavers when adapting a composition to this demanding medium; but getting in close to a finished tapestry reveals how such a richness of colour is produced by the workshop’s signature method of weaving with a blend of differently tinted woollen threads.

Welsh born Leach-Jones initially gained attention on the 1960s Australian gallery scene with Colour-Field abstractions which crossed the latest style from the US with devices lifted from traditional Celtic decorative arts. His square-shaped paintings and prints consisted of a dominant circular form which he then filled with flattened curvilinear patterns, sometimes combining knotwork, interlocking geometric shapes, spirals and triskeles, executed using a bright crisp Sixties palette. Younger and progressive collectors really took to his eye-catching abstractions.

But staff at the Victorian Tapestry Workshop did not warm to the flattened and schematic Celtic visual mazes of those earlier works. Instead, the weavers saw great possibilities in the still life-based abstracts Leach-Jones produced decades later. Steeped in 1920s French cubism, some of these more spatial compositions were deliberate homages to Fernand Léger and Georges Braque. He even gave several typical ‘20s cubist titles.

Several walls in the gallery are hung with these visually intelligent, if light-hearted pieces, the larger major paintings The Plain Sense of Things (Nocturne) and Romance of Death each getting their own walls, where they are displayed as considered statements. But, as stated, the entire exhibition has been visually designed around the Revisited Objects tapestry which by filling the far end wall when you enter the gallery indisputably holds the commanding position.

Christopher Heathcote, one of Australia’s foremost art critics, served as senior art critic for the Age, and an associate editor of Art Monthly Australia.