Anita Larkin obtained a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Sydney College of The Arts in 1993, with a graduating body of work that explored ideas of human impermanence by making an installation of direct casts of the human body in paper. The following year two of these paper life size sculptures toured regional Australia in The Really Big Paper Show curated by The Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney.
Looking for a new material to explore the human body, Larkin learnt the skill of making felt by hand in 1994. In the following 20 years she continued to accumulate considerable knowledge in this ancient craft, and has made many sculptures using this medium, as well as regularly teaching her skills to others. Her felted artworks have been shown in numerous national and international textile art exhibitions, including the 2nd Tamworth Textile Triennial, and Sculptural Felt International, in The Netherlands.
Larkin finds handmade felt to be an intriguing contemporary sculpture material, with one foot in our primal Neolithic past and one foot in industrial modern society. The innate properties of felt speak metaphorically about social issues within her conceptual works. Handmade felt has a long history of use as insulation, for warmth and for sound, and it is these two concepts that emerge in her work most often. One example is the work shown in The Wynne Prize 2008, (now in Wollongong Art Gallery’s collection). Titled “Conduit” the work is a felted wearable apparatus that physically links the head, heart, and feet of two people together.
Collected Objects are also a constant part of Larkin’s art practice. There is intentional and playful disruption of the familiar and the everyday within her works, where the ordinary object is transformed into something beguiling and loaded. Larkin often forms an incongruous union of one object with another, or reconfigures the object so that it behaves in an unexpected way, thereby disrupting the usual reading of the object. Her artworks, and their titles, often display a wry sense of humour. Good examples are works where a cricket ball is seen to be growing a breast, a truncated telephone rendered useless by insulating it with felt, or a gun that becomes a sewing machine stitching a line into the gallery wall. These three works were part of a body of work made for her 2015 solo show at Defiance Gallery, titled the “Breath Within Me”
Many of Larkin’s works play with the suggestion of physical movement or a practical function for the hitherto inanimate object. Her poignantly fictitious inventions playfully suggest that objects might have parallel lives, her work Leaping Chair, is one example, in which a chair seemingly jumps from one gallery wall to the other. By aligning emotions and desires with an inanimate object, the object can be seen as a metaphor for ourselves. Larkin takes this one step further by joining direct casts from the human body (usually her own) with sections of collected objects.
Represented by Defiance Gallery, Sydney since 2000, Larkin has exhibited her work both internationally and within Australia. She has completed several public art commissions, works on private commissions, teaches sculpture and feltmaking, and assists in the curating and organization of exhibitions.
Solo exhibition highlights include: Bodily Felt/Project Contemporary Artspace1997, Object Incognito/Wollongong Art Gallery 2007, Anita Larkin/Defiance Gallery 2009, Leaping chair/Wollongong Art Gallery 2011, The Improbable Object/Defiance Gallery 2012, The Breath Within/Defiance Gallery 2015 Group exhibition highlights include; The Wynne Prize, Sculpture by the Sea, The Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, The UWS Acquisitive Sculpture Award, The 2nd Tamworth Textile Triennial, The Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize, The Blake Prize, The International World Textile Art Biennial of Contemporary Art, Sculptural Felt International, The Beijing International Art Biennale.
Collection highlights include: The Lady Ethel Nock Sculpture Collection, Wollongong City Council, Shellharbour City Council, Macquarie University Sculpture Park, Westmead Hospital, Wollongong City Gallery, The University of Wollongong and The Australian War Memorial Art Collection.
- Writers:
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- Date written:
- 2015
- Last updated:
- 2015
