These quirky creatures in an array of playful poses reflect something of us.
These quirky creatures in an array of playful poses reflect something of us.
By Kerrie O’Brien
February 2, 2025 — 3.55pm
Bunnies as mad shaggers is one theme of Hannah Gartside’s beautifully crafted sculptures but there is also tenderness, melancholy and humour.
Created using women’s gloves, one glove tucked into another to create a single rabbit, they are remarkably evocative.
In addition to those in an amusing array of sexual positions, some fly solo and some are otherwise engaged. One squat character leans back with a decided mansplainer arrogance; another tenderly cradles a baby bunny. Created using long evening gloves, others stand tall like sentries, arms crossed, watching over proceedings.
Gartside’s show at the upcoming Melbourne Art Fair, Bunnies in Love, Lust and Longing, features dozens of these sculptures in their first public airing en masse. The 37-year-old Melbourne-based artist says the longing of the title “is not simply sexual; it’s a longing to be understood and for there to be space for that”.
The sleepy bunny, who is lying down resting its head on its hand, which she made last year, won the 2024 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize.
“[It] really just showed me what I needed at the time, which was solitude and rest. So the works can do that thing of showing me something new, maybe something that I want to feel, or something that I haven’t realised,” she says, adding that she’s interested to see how they resonate with audiences.
“The emotional tones vary, which actually is a real joy for me because in some of them it’s very tender and some of them, like these, my bigger guys, it’s more ridiculous and light-hearted, like he’s absurd.”
Gartside is one of 100 artists exhibiting at the annual fair, held later this month. Featuring 70 galleries and Indigenous art centres from across the country, under new director Melissa Loughnan, the event this year is female-led and it has First Peoples and traditionally overlooked artists at the forefront. It includes multi-disciplinary works, workshops and conversations with artists, curators, writers and gallerists.
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Represented by Tolarno Galleries, Gartside also makes large-scale, kinetic works. The Museum of Contemporary Art showed five as part of Primavera 2021, each representing an iconic woman from history. Crafted from an array of stunning fabrics and mechanically powered, they appeared to dance around the room, alluding to Gartside’s former career. Before moving to study in Melbourne at the VCA, she worked in wardrobe at the Queensland Ballet and before that, in fashion design.
She is obsessed with fabric and materials, old clothes and ephemera. “You’re swaddled in [cloth] when you’re born and shrouded in it when you die, we sleep in it every night and we wear [it] every day yet in some ways [its] significance in our physical and emotional lives is glossed over,” she says.
Gartside’s grandmother Peg taught her to sew when she was seven. In 2014, she made a quilt from Peg’s Liberty print clothes, her mother’s nightie and curtains from the family home. A beloved piece, it is much used and mended: she sleeps under it each night.
Her work often involves using materials from the past. Currently on show at Wangaratta Art Gallery, one series uses women’s nighties. “Broadly, Fantasies started as a way for me to articulate and describe the desires and curiosities I felt in relation to other people,” she wrote about the show. “The whole project uses c. 1950s-1970s second-hand nighties (complete with perfume smells, faded period stains and the dreams and experiences of the bodies that originally wore these garments).”
Another featured her late father’s business shirts and ties. “When I found one of his hairs on the collar I broke down, but it also clicked for me that these objects were resonant way beyond their physical presence,” she says. “So I knew early on that there was this way to transform everyday textiles, and to work with not only their physical properties, but their emotional, historical, and contextual resonances.”
Using such materials is partly about sustainability but that deeper element resonates. “They allude to a body that previously inhabited them. So when I work with old materials, there’s a real sense for me of an absence, of a life that once existed and now doesn’t. I treat these materials with respect. To me, they have their own sentience.”
There are material inheritances as well as psychological inheritances she can then play with. It’s the idea of memory and what stays in the fabric after the wearer is gone: the creases left in the elbows of a shirt, the sweat or period stains, the smells.
Gartside takes cues from those marks of life: a well-worn and slightly soiled index finger of a glove becomes the bum of a rabbit: “In my work what is discarded becomes precious again.”
Melbourne Art Fair is at Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre from February 20 to 23.
Kerrie O’Brien is a senior writer, culture, at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via Twitter, Facebook or email.
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