Pattern Translation: Al Munro

PATTERN TRANSLATION 

AL MUNRO 

Craft ACT Craft + Design Centre 

11 July– 31 August 2019

Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre is supported by the 

ACT Government, the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy – 

an initiative of the Australian State and Territory Governments, 

and the Australia Council for the Arts – the 

Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory 

body. 

CRAFT ACT CRAFT + DESIGN CENTRE 

Tues–Fri 10am–5pm 

Saturdays 12–4pm 

Level 1, North Building, 180 London 

Circuit, 

Canberra ACT Australia 

+61 2 6262 9333 

www.craftact.org.au 

Front cover: Red Blue Weave Disturbance 

2018, 80 x 60cm, acrylic on canvas. 

Courtesy of the artist and MAY SPACE, Sydney.

PATTERN TRANSLATION 

AL MUNRO 

Craft ACT Craft + Design Centre 

11 July– 31 August 2019

Al Munro, Pattern Translation opening, July 2019, 

Photo: 5 Foot Photography.

Artist Statement 

Al Munro 

The work in the exhibition continues my interest in translating and distorting 

mathematical patterns to explore relationships between textile patterning and painted 

abstraction, and begins a new focus on the aberrations and slippages that can occur 

as a pattern, like a a spoken message, is translated from one ‘language’ to another. 

This process is somewhat like the child’s game of Whisper down the lane or Chinese 

Whispers in which a message is whispered from one person to the next; the joy of the 

game comes from the unexpected changes to the message that have occurred in the 

process of communication. 

The exhibition consists of four pairs of dresses sewn from digitally printed fabrics 

and paintings. The process by which these pairs of works were produced involved 

translating textile patterns into painted forms, translating and manipulating these via 

the conventions of repeat fabric design to create digitally printed textiles/paintings, 

and then translating back back to traditional painted form. This created a series of 

opportunities for the patterns to be distorted, either by the conventions of the media 

(e.g the opportunity to undertake reflections and rotations to create a repeat pattern 

for textile printing) or through the natural slippages and changes that ossified through 

each iteration. 

Al Munro is represented in Australia by May Space, Sydney 

5

Rough Translation 

exhibition essay: brian parkes 

As I read the various artists statements 

and texts developed for these three 

exhibitions I was struck by a recurring 

notion of translation. Al Munro 

refers to it explicitly in the title of her 

show, which relates to the process of 

creating her patterned textiles, during 

which she literally translates digital to 

analogue and back again. 

Her process of gradual distortion, 

flipping between hand and machine, 

seems to soften or recalibrate the 

harder edges of modernism – or at 

least the computerised version of it 

that has become so familiar in the 

21st century – creating patterns 

that resonate with more emotional 

intensity. 

This process has much in common 

with Gilbert Riedelbauch’s long history 

of combining manual craft practice 

with digital fabrication. In his new 

body of work, Gilbert translates 

ideas from analogue (models and 

sketches) to digital (CAD rendering and 

component manufacture) and back to 

analogue (hand-making through the 

development of precision tooling). 

These works, made up of invitingly 

interactive reconfigurable 

components, are bespoke industrial 

objects that hum with a sense of the 

tension between hand-making and 

machine production. 

The intervention of the hand – no 

matter how precise – in this process of 

translation, seems to imply an element 

of inaccuracy – the echo of human 

touch. A rough translation. 

In considering the ideas expressed 

through the group exhibition Shifts 

in Japanese Materiality, thoughtfully 

curated by Bic Tieu, I see this same 

sense of rough translation in the handrendering 

of various distinctions and 

commonalities between the cultures 

and aesthetics of Australia and Japan. 

As someone who has worked directly 

with makers of many sorts since 

enrolling in an art school in Tasmania 

as a teenager, I am drawn to the rough 

(handmade) and to the refinement of 

the rough that is the mastery of a craft 

practice. 

Perhaps the translation I’m seeing is a 

transformation through craft. The kind 

of thing the late, and much missed, 

Dr Robert Bell was referring to in his 

2005 exhibition at the National Gallery

of Australia, Transformations: the 

language of craft. 

I like the idea that craft can be a 

universal intermediary language – 

making the foreign more familiar 

(whether it’s new technology or 

another culture). Rather than seeing 

things lost in translation, with craft – 

through the transformative skills of the 

maker – we more often see something 

added in translation. 

In Kyoko Hashimoto’s reworking of 

the traditional Japanese form of 

Buddhist prayer beads or Nenju in 

Shifts in Japanese Materiality (in which 

the aggregate in the concrete beads 

is coloured plastic from her son’s 

discarded toys) we see a ubiquitous 

object (a string of beads) transformed 

into a poignant statement about the 

environmental impact of global trade 

and our, often unwitting, personal 

culpability (at least, that’s my rough 

translation). 

In Liam Mugavin’s House Chair series 

the craft process is a light but refined 

touch, recontextualising the reclaimed 

timbers, to allow, as he says, ‘the 

material to speak and 

the designs to tell their own stories.’ 

(who like the curator Bic Tieu, is also a 

maker) that does more justice to the 

works and the ideas expressed than I 

can in these few paragraphs. 

* 

The opportunity to look at these 

three exhibitions together allows us 

to see contrasts and connections that 

make us think in ways that would be 

different if they were seen alone or in 

some other combination. Another clear 

connection I see across the works in 

these shows is an aesthetic one – there 

is, quite simply, a lot of beautiful work 

here! 

I love that through craft, our many rich 

differences, whether political, social or 

cultural, can be roughly translated into 

things that inspire and unite us. 

Brian Parkes 

CEO, JamFactory 

Adelaide, July 2019 

There is a terrific catalogue 

accompanying Shifts in Japanese 

Materiality available online. It includes 

a great essay by Dr Nicholas Bastin

Al Munro, Pattern Translation opening, July 2019, 

Photo: 5 Foot Photography. 


Top image: Pa koa ma Weave Disturbance, 2018, 30 x 30 cm, acrylic on birch panel 

Bottom image: Yellow Weave Disturbance, 2018, 30 x 30 cm, acrylic on birch panel 


Pattern Translation series 1-4, 2018-2019, acrylic 

on saa paper, cut and collaged on birch panel. 


Pattern Translation series 1-4, 2018-2019, acrylic on 

saa paper, cut and collaged on birch panel 


Pattern Translation series 1-4, 2018-2019, acrylic on 

saa paper, cut and collaged on birch panel. 


Pattern Translation series 4, 2018-2019, acrylic on saa paper, cut and collaged on birch panel. 

Pattern Translation dresses 4, 2019, digital print on organic cotton, dress making by Angela 

Coleman. Photo: Kate Matthews. Courtesy of the artist and MAY SPACE, Sydney.







Pattern Translation series 3, 2018-2019, acrylic on saa paper, cut and collaged on birch panel 



Weave Translation Cushions, 2019, dye sublimation print on cotton/poly blend 

Red Blue Weave Disturbance, 2018, acrylic on canvas 

Photo: Kate Matthews. Courtesy of the artist and MAY SPACE, Sydney.

Weave Translation Cushions, 2019, dye sublimation print on cotton/poly blend 

Pa koa ma Weave Disturbance, 2018, acrylic on birch panel, Yellow Weave Disturbance, 2018, 

acrylic on birch panel, Photo: Kate Matthews. Courtesy of the artist and MAY SPACE, Sydney.

List of works 

1 Pattern Translation series 

1, 2018-2019, acrylic on saa 

paper, cut and collaged on 

birch panel 

$1490 each 

6 Pattern Translation dresses 

2, 2019, digital print on organic 

cotton, dress making by Angela 

Coleman 

NFS 




birch panel 

$1490 each 




Coleman 

NFS 




birch panel 

$1490 each 




Coleman 

NFS 




birch panel 

$1490 each 


1, 2019, digital print on 

organic cotton, dress making 

by Angela Coleman 

NFS 

9 Weave Translation Cushions, 

2019, dye sublimation print on 

cotton/poly blend 

$48 

10 Weave Translation 

Cushions, 2019, dye sublimation 

print on cotton/poly blend 

$48 

20


Cushions, 2019, dye 

sublimation print on cotton/ 

poly blend 

$48 

16 Yellow Weave 

Disturbance, 2018, acrylic 

on birch panel 

$750 




poly blend 

$48 

17 Pa koa ma Weave 

Disturbance, 2018, acrylic 

on birch panel 

$750 




poly blend 

$48 




poly blend 

$48 

15 Red Blue Weave 

Disturbance, 2018, acrylic on 

canvas 

$1,490 

21

Pattern Translation: Al Munro

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