Melbourne-based Tammy Kanat is taking her crafty creations to a whole new scale, writes Stephen Todd.
Tammy Kanat is rooted deeply in time. When the Melbourne-based textile artist weaves brightly coloured skeins of wool into mammoth sculptures, she's channelling old narratives, or "whispers from female archetypes". Kanat cites the biblical names Miriam, Ruth, Sarah and Esther as inspiration, "not so much to represent these women," she insists, "but in an attempt to evoke an essence”.
The sculpture she's dubbed Miriam, the sister who supposedly cast baby Moses afloat on the Nile, "is all blues and greens and has a kind of cradle shape". Sarah - named for Abraham's wife who was said to have given birth at age 90 - is bulbous and rosy-hued; while Esther, a queen, is made with regal purples and blues.
“It's like it was something always within me. I just took to it and 11 years later, it's my undying love”. - Tammy Kanat
The eight works form Circle of Her, a new exhibition opening at the lewish Museum of Australia in Melbourne in September. Each piece embodies Kanat's thinking on womanhood, memory and connection and are in some way a reflection of her own being in the world, or as she puts it: "My truth and story as a woman”. The exhibition is followed by a presentation of Kanat's work at Carpet Diem during the prestigious Art Basel and Design Miami programs in Paris in October. These global art and design gatherings draw as many as 65,000 visitors, many of them international collectors.
Bob Cadry, managing director of Cadrys Rug and Carpet Showrooms in Sydney, has developed one of Kanat's sculptural pieces from 2022 into a two-metre-square "artist's proof" for the fair.
"Textiles are being appreciated in a whole new way," says Cadry, whose business has previously collaborated with Studio Shand, Matters + Made and Kate Nixon. "They are becoming, in some cases, as collectible as art.”
While the piece on show in Paris - based on a Kanat tapestry available at Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert in Sydney - is square, Cadry wants it to function as a "sampler" for special orders he envisages manufacturing in all manner of forms, from oblong to oval to round; "[or they could be] a combination of shapes based on that one element to create a bespoke rug so that it doesn't have regular parallel edges". The prototype on show at Carpet Diem will have a value of around $14,000, Cadry estimates.
Kanat began her career as a jeweller, a skill - like weaving - that she taught herself. "Jewellery started as a passion, a desire to give form to my thoughts," she says of her brand Mink, which ran from 2001 to 2013. "But as it became more of a business, I kind of fell out of love with it. It's the sense of sheer creativity that drives me."
Just more than a decade ago, while on a trip to New York, Kanat came across a wall tapestry, "perhaps from the 1960s. While she didn't take it back with her to Melbourne, she couldn't stop thinking about it. Then the epiphany hit: what if she were to make one herself? "It's like it was something always within me," she says. "I just took to it and Il years later, it's my undying love."
Kanat uses structural frames to create her large-scale works, which began as wall pieces but which have become bigger, more organic and three-dimensional. When ceiling-mounted, the viewer can walk under and around the textured sculptures, admiring them from all sides and in varying light. From some angles, the luscious wool and silk seem to almost glimmer with life, while knobby tendrils spill out along the floor: "They've become more bodily, more like they're people," says the artist, who adds that she's written letters to each of the figures that have been the inspiration for her Circle of Her sculptures. Kanat says they are too personal to share publicly, but that they act as "a meditation back through time”.
Kanat's meditation will likely be enhanced when in November she takes up residence at the Atelier Il, the last preserved atelier in the historic artists community of Cité Falguière in Paris. Known as the world's longest running international artists' residency program (established in the 1870s), it is based in a charmingly ramshackle workshop near Montparnasse that, according to a story in World of Interiors magazine, has noticeably tilled over time.
Frequented by the likes of Paul Gauguin, Amedeo Modigliani and immortalised in the 1916 painting L'Atelier de l'artiste à la Cité Falguière by Chaim Soutine, the studio will live in turn and depth in Kanat's history.
