Clare McCracken

Over 12-months Clare spoke to six international artists she had never met in China and Germany.  As they talked, the artists drew each other’s portrait using the blind contour drawing technique.  The drawings and conversations were then turned into a series of finished artworks that the artists shared with each other when they met in person six-months later in Shanghai. Clare’s response used the international language of cross-stitch to explore how women for centuries have used the medium of textiles to maintain and develop relationships across distance. By painstakingly stitching the portraits - pixel by pixel - she demonstrated how the act of making can forge a type of intimacy, which is difficult to foster over mobile technologies, particularly when there is a language divide.

Thread of a Conversation was exhibited as part of SkypeLab curated by Maggie McCormick, Henning Eichinger and Yong Lei in 2015 at the Chinese Consulate, Shanghai and in 2016 at the Städtische Galerie, Reutlingen. Thread of a Conversation: Javiera Advis and Yuemin Huang where exhibited in 2017 as part of the Wangaratta Art Gallery Textile Award Exhibition.  Thread of a Conversation: Yuemin Huang resides in the Wangaratta Art Gallery permanent collection.

Clare used Google street view to explore the layers, textures and tones of Havana. The panoramic photographs that she found were filled with tiny glitches – faces morphed into cobblestones, dogs congealed with humans and the shadow of the photographer cutting across façades. These glitches represented the edge of the internet, a moment unmapped where anything was possible. Pixel-by-pixel Clare converted the glitches into pocket-sized cross-stitches before travelling to Havana where she completed the embroidery on the original site. In the photographs of her site-specific stitching her body now blocks the information that the glitches once covered - a fragment of the city remains unmapped, a place where anything is possible.

By Clare McCracken with Andrew Ferris, 2019. Exhibited as part of Intercambio, curated by Damien Smith for the Bienal de la Habana 2019.

In the early 1980s Clare’s father took the Alpine Shire and the small township of Myrtleford (Victoria, Australia) to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, contesting the proposed construction of a 17-metre concrete snowman. The big snowman reflects the anxiety of identity experienced by rural Australian towns after the construction of the post Second World War road networks. As they lost their train-lines and were bypassed or driven though, many Australian towns felt like they were slipping off the map of Australia and fading into economic ruin. The big snowman was part of a tradition, inherited from the United States, of big sculptures in small townships, designed to put these communities on the tourist map by trapping the passing car in awe. Ultimately, McCracken’s father was successful and the giant snowman was never built; however, an estimated 300 ‘big things’ were installed from the 1960s on, and many still line Australian rural roadsides.

The fight over the giant snowman was lengthy and vicious: a conflict that gave Clare her first nickname – “Snowman Killer” – which plagued her early years of school. Snowman Killer combines performance, sculpture, photography, film and storytelling to present the archive from the original snowman controversy, Clare’s memories of the ordeal and a 7500 km road trip she took with a big carrot – a to-scale representation of the nose of the never constructed snowman – across Australia visiting ‘big things’. In doing so the work also explores the architectural, social, emotional, gendered and environmental impact of the car on rural Australia throughout the second half of the 20th century.

Outcomes for this project have included exhibitions, a series of performance lectures presented in Australia and the United Kingdom and a book manuscript which was shortlisted for the Hardie Grant Spark Prize for narrative non-fiction.

To view a performance lecture of the work visit the Writing & Concepts website.

Lead artist, writer and producer Clare McCracken / photographic documentation of performances Andrew Ferris / Video Documentation and Editing - Jim Arneman / Music - Golden Hour written and composed by Nick Huggins / Props and Costume - Andrew Ferris, Mattea Davies & Clare McCracken. Exhibited at Lancaster University, 2018.

As Cambodia rapidly urbanises it is the urban poor that are forcibly removed from their homes to make way for shiny new apartment towers they cannot afford. In 2014 during a residency at the White Building, a medium-density slum in central Phnom Penh, Clare stitched pocket-sized cross-stitches of the ornate bricks of the building and its 1950s wrought iron window grills over the top of cross-stitch patterns of Angkor Wat. She gifted these tiny works to the residents she met - something they could take with them as a reminder of their community when it was demolished. In 2017, as the Cambodian government demolished the building, Clare created another series of the works: in memory of a community that had now been dispersed and destroyed.

By Clare McCracken 2017. This work resides in the Wangaratta Art Gallery permanent collection and private collections across Australia, South East Asia & Europe.

Atrophy 1, 2 & 3 (rust details from ANL Wahroonga) was created as Clare steamed from Australia to China on the ANL Wahroonga container ship.

The ANL Wahroonga was an ecosystem of care where ship and crew kept each other from what the other could not survive. For the crew, this meant that the vessel kept them safe from the immensity of the sea while for the ship; this was protection from the impact of seawater. As Clare walked around the decks of the ship, she found endless evidence of this relationship. Tiny rectangles of grey, similar dimensions to the embroidery, covering a section where a crew member had angle-grinded back the rust and repainted it. At 16 years old the ANL Wahroonga was patch-worked in layers of these rectangles, both an indication of how relentless seawater can be, but also of the years of labour invested in the ship by the crew to keep it mobile.

Constructed using 21 different cotton colours, 47,520 stitches the three cross-stitches took around 500 hours of work, which Clare did both on board the ship and back in her studio in Melbourne. Consequently, in the time the work took to be created, the ANL Wahroonga had boomeranged back and forth between Australia and China three times, the crew toiling over the atrophy of the vessel the whole time. In labouring over a section of rust for so long, and with such attention to detail, the cross-stitches paid tribute to the symbiotic relationship between man, machine, time and the elements – a creation of decay that in its formation froze the atrophy of a small section of the ship indefinitely.

Atrophy 1, 2 & 3 was exhibited as part of The Place Between at the Mission to Seafarers, Melbourne, 2018. It was shortlisted for the Darebin Art Prize for excellence in contemporary visual art and exhibited at the Bundoora Homestead, Melbourne, 2019. It was also shortlisted for the Victorian Mission to Seafarers Maritime Art Prize and exhibited at the Melbourne Mission to Seafarers, 2020.

Public seating is designed so it can only be occupied for a short periods of time. The My Place, Your Place, Our Place cushion project encouraged the residents of Dandenong to claim their public space, and to sit for as long as they wanted.  300 hand-crafted Cushions were scattered throughout the square, and handed out to visitors over the six-hour period of the Civic Centre launch, ensuring that they could sit and enjoy the free public events at the Square, for as long as they wanted, in comfort.

By Clare McCracken, 2014. Commissioned by City of Greater Dandenong’s. Produced by Nadja Kostich.

From the 1950s through to the 1970s, the Patris brought tens of thousands of Greek migrants to Australia. One afternoon, as the vice-captain performed his port checks, he discovered a man crying and whispering into the ship’s hull. ‘What are you doing?’ he enquired, ‘I’m sending messages back to my loved ones in Greece,’ said the man (Kastelloriou 2017). For most post Second World War migrants the distance between their homeland and Australia was so great that they never returned. A year and a half ago, as I took a 20-hour flight from London to Perth, I couldn’t stop thinking of that man whispering into the Patris. In just over 50 years, technology, and the cost to use that technology, had essentially shrunken the globe - I felt none of the isolation that previous generations had experienced.

However, in a matter of weeks, as the coronavirus spread across Asia, Europe and the Americas, planes were grounded, and borders closed and I found myself isolated, dreaming of the global cities I love but could no longer access. I Was There but Now I’m Here was created in response – suffering from insomnia I embarked on a digital dérive, visiting my favourite global public spaces with the aid of Google Street View. As I clicked and scrolled, I wrote a diary logging what I was thinking, before capturing a screen shot that reminded me of a specific memory. Over the following weeks I stitched that screenshot into a pocket-sized tapestry that could be carried with me as I walked the now empty streets of Melbourne.

By Clare McCracken with Andrew Ferris. Shortlisted for the 2021 Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award and exhibited at the Wangaratta Art Gallery, 2021.

In the late eighteen hundreds, Charles Baudelaire felt that the traditional arts were inadequate when it came to recording his rapidly industrialising city.  Baudelaire argued that artists should immerse themselves in the metropolis and become ‘a botanist of the sidewalk’.  The tool for this interaction was the flâneur – a way of strolling slowly through the city aimlessly ‘in order to experience it’ - to walk at the pace of a tortoise. 

Adopting these concepts, and reflecting on the safety of the female body in Melbourne’s streets post Jill Meagher’s violent death,  Clare became part tortoise, part dandy (part endangered spices, part urban explorer) and went on a series of long, slow walks. Over four weeks she walked from Federation Square to the Melbourne Ports, the International Airport and 30km up the Yarra River to Darebin Creek. As she strolled she documented what she saw turning her lengthy adventure into an artist book.

A month after her exploration of the city Clare occupied Federation Square, handing her artist book to the people she met as a record of her lengthy participation on the streets of Melbourne. As Clare moved about the square a film played on the big screen documenting her evolution from ordinary woman to dandy tortoise.

By Clare McCracken, 2013. Commissioned by Federation Square. This work was also recommissioned by Melbourne City Council and RMIT Univeristy to interrogate the safety of Hosier Lane as part of Urban Lab, curated by Fiona Hillary.