Rosie Deacon

Born in Nyngan and growing up across regional New South Wales, Rosie Deacon has been inspired by craft practices since her earliest years as a maker. Deacon's re-contextualisation of craft work – installing fun foam sculptures, pom poms, and sequinned surfaces in the gallery –  is cleverly partial, grounded as it often is in collaborative community-engagement methods. Bounding between nostalgia, kitsch, absurdity, and a heartfelt project of connecting with people and with place, Deacon's emotionally expansive practice has grown to incorporate sculptural, installation, video, performance, and curatorial projects. We spoke with her ahead of Spaghetti-Stack-Snuffle-Shuffle – her first solo exhibition in Victoria, at Bunjil Place Gallery.

Work for this show has been devised in part while on residency at the Old Cheese Factory in Berwick. How did this space/place shape the work, and do any other places inform it? 

The residency at the Old Cheese Factory was a fantastic opportunity to have time and space to develop new sculptural forms and ideas. It was time spent building/collecting/undoing/redoing directly referring to the surrounding environment. 

I then had two weeks to install in the gallery at Bunjil Place, to transform it into a playful escape, making the work immersive and exploratory throughout. This space, its volume and shape, dictated many elements of my process-based installation – exploring states of humanity, feelings of belonging, and realms of the absurd.

Can you tell us a little about your collaboration with students from Gwendoline Kindergarten for Spaghetti-Stack-Snuffle-Shuffle? What surprised you about this working relationship? 

It was a beautiful experience to work with Gwendoline Kindergarten, making over ninety “joey” sculptures to be part of the installation in the gallery. Many of the materials used in the making of the exhibition have been gathered from local op shops and art disposal centres, alongside gifted craft materials such as “fun foam” and bouncing putty, which was donated by a toy shop and saved from landfill to unusable “joey” pouches donated by Wildlife Victoria. I hope to engage more people in the challenges wildlife face in their struggle to survive.

How would you contextualise your interest in community engagement and collaboration within your broader practice?

I enjoy inviting people to take part, to connect and learn, and to build relationships. I believe learning through creative play can engage with a broad range of audiences. My work is process orientated; my outcomes are social and impart a presence in the gallery or location I am working in, particularly my performance works.

We’re excited to see that some of your work for Bunjil Place calls on Aerobics Oz Style, a staple of early Saturday-morning television in many late twentieth-century childhoods. Thinking about this work, and also about your parrot earrings, referencing Ken Done’s designs for Arnott’s, can you talk a little about your relationship to these icons of Australian culture in the twentieth century? 

Taking inspiration from my childhood, my work is a nostalgic one. I enjoy making playful work that comes from a rich memory of making and gifting.

So what were your first experiences with craft methods? 

I grew up in Nyngan, Central West New South Wales. Found objects and recyclables was a big theme growing up, using these pieces to make sculpture for your garden (like those tyre swans), or a giant and absurd letter box made from discarded tractor parts. My parents’ house is filled with tapestries my Mum has stitched, many with a prize ribbon hanging over the frame from the annual Nyngan Show. I would walk around the farm with my grandmother, finding interesting branches and seed pods that we crafted into willy wagtail wall hangings. Making a welcoming home, country fetes and street stall sales, country craft classes at the local sewing store, and making gifts for people were big parts of my upbringing.

And what about the classic materials of craft, which you often recontextualise in sculptural and installation projects – what draws you to these?

I usually start with materials, something fun and easy to make. I enjoy shopping and collecting the materials, not always knowing what the work is about. People often give me materials that they would otherwise discard, like seven hundred kilograms of fun foam from a toy manufacturing company, stacks of cardboard tubes from cotton reels, boxes of beads etc.

Once I collect all my materials, I feel excited by what it could become, without knowing the outcome. I enjoy threading, stitching, gluing, and repetitive crafts as I feel immersed in the work without the pressure of coming up with meaning, or it being successful. As the piles of craft build, I gain more excitement and perspective of what it may become. Usually, these pieces are added as background environments or decorative features. I become immersed into the world I can create – something new and strange. I want people to be inside the work, to feel it, and have an experience.

I like to push colour and materials into overload, to transform the space into a new, strange environment. I arrive at the space with objects and other elements I have made at my studio, then incorporate them into the installation. I like to build using offcuts and discarded junk from the area, and source materials from local op shops and garage sales. Taking something cute, colourful, and fun, and pushing it so far that people don’t know what to make of it.

EXHIBITION 
Spaghetti-Stack-Snuffle-Shuffle
5 November 2022 – 26 February 2023
Bunjil Place Gallery, Melbourne