HARD YAKKA

HARD YAKKA represents a solo exhibition incorporating 36 artworks with an accompanying public artist talk. The show is an exploration of the humble yet iconic flannel shirt. Long before the Work, Health & Safety culture of late capitalism brought the world hi-vis uniforms, the flannel shirt was associated with the trades, rural life and the working classes. Consequently, this exhibition may be read within the context of modern and contemporary artworks and portrait studies of the worker, the proletariat, and other complex historical associations between art and work, including the relations between artists and their affective labour and unpaid efforts. The artworks are informed by past photographic practices and theory, and art historical sources to look at how the sensory qualities of disembodied clothing and personal items are employed to invoke loss and also induce sensorial memory. The show continues Frederick’s ongoing creative practice research into in the material traces made through human action; the contested value of everyday things; and the capacity of visual and sonic media to conjure different temporalities. As objects, traces, patterns and mnemonics of bodily gesture and form, the artworks invite us to consider the nexus and the tensions between presence/absence, abstraction/representation and conceptual and decorative expression.