Jessie Deane, The Big Build, 2023, thread on canvas, dimensions 85 x 78 cm photo: Jessie Deane
Jessie Deane honours the ugly but beautiful industrial landscape around her, stitch by stitch.
The Big Build Is a large, illuminated image of the 250-tonne green gantry crane that looms large on Whitehall Street. It’s an immense, unyielding, and vibrant presence, a landmark image but it’s not permanent. I wanted to document this moment in time. It carries the weight of the West Gate Tunnel build which is a massive topic for Melbourne’s west right now. I live in Yarraville and have done for several years. I’m absorbed into the landscapes I recreate. The proximity to industry in the West really inspires me. It is a perfect playground for my creative interest. I use thread to hand stitch the often decaying industrial and urban landscapes of Melbourne’s West.
I am interested in subverting the medium of needlepoint to explore dichotomies between the heavy-duty and the hand-made; the cold, rigid industrial materials, and the warm malleability of the thread; the “masculine” world of industry, and the “feminine” world of craft. Melbourne’s west is the ideal stomping ground for source material. It’s also my home, and I’m obsessed with the West. I’m obsessed with paradox and drawn to oppositional forces, attracted to counterpoint. Melbourne’s west has a landscape that is entirely contradictory: ugly but beautiful, intimate but vast, mundane but colourful. It’s my inspiration.
I’m driven by compulsion. I must do it. My creative drive has always been paramount. As a child I relentlessly made. Every present I received growing up was connected to making.
My decisions are often impulsive. I’ll see something I’ve been surrounded by on a particular day in a particular light and decide to make a needlepoint of it. I could drive past something, and I must pull over to capture it.
I capture images on my iPhone which are never particularly accurate replicas of the moment. That’s when the thread, colour and creative license come into play.
My visual memories are vivid so the images I capture hold the basic structure and then the rest is my imagination. I build the artworks from my memory and the experience of that moment. Using this process, I can play with my obsession in colour and my desire to mess with colour.
I include colours that may be completely out of place. My favourite thing is to run fluorescent-coloured lines up a telegraph post or along the line of a building. Often the most unlikely colour for that moment but it always seems to work and is often the very thing that people comment on when they look close. From a distance it just becomes light and shade and blends into the image, but close up, it sticks out like a sore thumb!
I certainly have a strong desire to express love for the unloved, to bring beauty to the mundane and to draw attention to the unnoticed.
Jessie Deane, Co Health Old building and new building, 2017, thread on canvas, dimensions h 90x w 115 cm photo: Jessie Deane
I certainly have a strong desire to express love for the unloved, to bring beauty to the mundane and to draw attention to the unnoticed. My biggest joy is infusing beauty into what is often perceived as ugly, and bringing to life something that has been seen by so many but not really seen.
I think the medium of thread, its softness and malleability, is a perfect way to represent the changing industrial and suburban landscape of Melbourne’s west. There is something joyful in representing hard, industrial, “man-made” infrastructure by using soft, colourful thread.
I’ve been engaged in textiles my entire life. It’s firmly in me. I studied art and then completed my degree in Fashion and Textiles specialising in Woven Textiles. I also have a family legacy. My great aunt Cecily made needlepoints from kits back in the 70s and 80s and I would have received a few kits throughout my childhood. I never loved the images in the kits all that much, so I started making my own canvases. I just thought that when I went to the effort of spending 100s of hours on a needlepoint project, I’d like to end up with an artwork I want to live with rather than a ballet or floral scene, or The Last Supper!! It grew from there.
My Great Great Aunt was a rug maker. She was relatively well known in 1920s European interior design circles. Her name was Evelyn Wyld, not to be confused with the Miles Franklin and Stella award-winning author, Evie Wyld, who is my cousin and Evelyn Wyld’s namesake! Evelyn worked with the very influential designer and architect, Eileen Gray. They were best friends having been at school together and then they went on to collaborate. Initially, Eileen designed the rugs and Evie made them, but Evie went on to design her own and had an atelier with her ‘friend’ named Eyre de Lanux.
My favourite Great Aunt Biddy (who I named my dog after) told me the story of Evelyn when I was around 19 years old. I had just decided that I was going to specialise in woven textiles, at university. Biddy was my confidant and when I revealed my decision to study textiles, she told me I had an Aunt who was a weaver and who “enjoyed the companionship of women”. I later discovered Evie was part of the “Sapphic Modernism” movement in Paris. As someone who had recently discovered/admitted the same leanings, I took that moment as an opportunity to come out to Biddy. Her response was “Of course you are darling. I knew it from the day you were born!” There is a resurgence in textiles for sure, and that is a great thing. But proudly, my Great Great Aunt was a pioneer and that is a driver for me. I feel I owe it to Evelyn to carry the mantle.
The biggest amount of feedback I get from people is: “I’ve walked past that building every day of my life for the last 10 years and I’ve never noticed it, and then I saw that piece and I suddenly started to notice it. It makes me feel good when that happens.”
The Big Build won the acquisitive award at the Footscray Art Prize in 2023.
About Jessie Deane
I am Jessie Deane, a textile artist working in needlepoint. I live in Yarraville, at the heart of Melbourne’s west. I use thread to hand stitch the often decaying industrial and urban landscapes of Melbourne’s West. I am particularly interested in subverting the medium of needlepoint to explore dichotomies between the heavy-duty, and the hand-made; the cold, rigid industrial materials, and the warm malleability of the thread; the “masculine” world of industry, and the “feminine” world of craft. Visit www.jessiedeane.com/ and follow @jessiedeaneneedlepoint/
