Threaded Perspectives

Threaded Perspectives is part of a series of never-before-seen exhibitions of the City of Joondalup Art Collection in celebration of its 25-year milestone. This anniversary program celebrates the value of the Art Collection for local community, and offers insight into the identity of the collection and its unique make-up of West Australian artists. In 2023, this included a retrospective of the Invitation Art Prize, which featured the winning artwork from each year of the award.

Within the span of 25 years, three major threads have emerged within the City of Joondalup Art Collection: suburbia and the Northern Corridor, materiality and form, and interpretations of landscape. Threaded Perspectives brings together a selection of highlights from the collection, each offering a unique insight and exploration of these three themes.

Reflecting on the history and geography of the Joondalup region, it is evident to see how these themes have developed prominently within the collection. Rapid and expansive suburban growth since 1998 has undoubtedly had significant impact on artists that engage with Joondalup and similar high growth areas within the Perth metropolitan region. These artists are keen observers of everyday experiences of suburbia, often drawing upon local suburban aesthetics or playful moments they stumble upon.

Similarly, artists have often been intrigued with the City’s breadth of natural environments, with the region boasting landscapes as diverse as wetlands, coastline, and bushland. Some artists dive deep into a specific place and their relation to it, while other artists channel their ongoing engagement with landscape and its presence into works that speak more broadly about their feeling and connection to place.

Artworks that engage with ideas of materiality and form have steadily rose within the Collection’s lifespan. Interestingly, many of these works have been acquired from the City’s annual Invitation Art Prize, a contemporary art prize for professional artists. Perhaps this speaks to a broader trend among contemporary artists in Western Australia. Central to these works is a sharp awareness of their chosen media’s materiality and how it can be manipulated, stretched, pulled or corrupted to create an artwork. These works are often characterised by a sense of material play, unexpected moments and questions of “how did they do that?”.

A central role of the artist is to observe and consume the world around them, filter it through their own experiences and generate an artistic outcome that offers a compelling interpretation of their interests. Threaded Perspectives aims to highlight the different approaches artists take from similar departure points, offering reflections on varied experiences of the world around us.