Heirloom

About the exhibition
Heirloom was a group exhibition featuring four artists based across Australia and New Zealand, each of whom explores personal history by gathering cultural motifs and reinterpreting them in relation to their own environments. Unravelling ideas of memory, narrative and inherited belief systems, the exhibition showcased the distinct visual languages of each artist.

Savanhdary Vongpoothorn’s works incorporated abstracted patterns from Laotian textiles into delicately perforated works on paper. Yuk King Tan presented two key works: Perso11ae, 1993, an installation of purchased and constructed wooden and plastic masks bound in red thread; and Graft, 1994, a grid of Chinese fans inscribed with parts of the body.

Diena Georgetti, known for her use of visual references from fashion, architecture, design and advertising in dialogue with the canon of art, exhibited paintings that propose new, imagined symbolic orders. Kate Beynon’s voracious image-making practice that metabolises the hybridity and flux of a multicultural, postmodern existence was represented by Old Recipe, 1996, composed of chenille sticks and laser photocopies.

Acknowledgements
This exhibition was part of the 1996 Next Wave Festival Visual Arts Program.

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^{Image: Yuk King Tan, Graf 1994, fans, stretch silk, laser copy transfers, stamp, hooks, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Vavasour Godkin Gallery, New Zealand. Photo: Glenys Ng}