Against the Rush of the Arrow
2024/2025. Art Gallery of South Australia, Radical Textiles
Brass, recycled textiles, thread, embroidery floss, bronze, cotton.
Amber Cronin has long explored the intersection of text and language in her textile-based practice, grounded in an ongoing critique of hierarchies of knowledge that position language as foundational to meaning-making. The English word “text” derives from the Latin textus, meaning fabric or weave, which itself comes from the verb textere (to weave). Text, then, is what is woven together.
In her textile work, Amber Cronin presents a series of wall-mounted textile sculptures devised as a vocabulary of forms concerned with eschatology—the science of last things. Given that our present moment is characterized by political and ecological crises and debates around responsibility, sustainability, and social justice, Cronin proposes that what we need are perspectives and stories that offer opportunities to relate to ourselves, to the society in which we live, and to practices that might guide us through this chapter of great unravelling. Concerned with the inevitability of collapse, Amber’s sculptures are conceived as a set of tools to better navigate this epoch of great upheaval. They are artefacts that serve to prepare us for the end life as we know.
Against the rush of the arrow is a set of contemplative, melancholic works that emerge from a need to make sense of an uncertain world. Akin to the historical complexity of textiles themselves, objects and embroideries are laced with symbolism. The use of fabric, thread and wrapping as a means of repair weaves together a lineage of solidarity, shared knowledge and labour that spans from ancient times through the present and into tomorrow.
The development of this new work, ‘Against the Rush of the Arrow’ was funded by Helpmann Academy and Arts South Australia for Radical Textiles, commissioned by Art Gallery of South Australia 2024/2025
