Rebecca Mayo: Habitus

Rebecca Mayo Habitus - photo by Matthew StantonConnecting her interests in sustainable practices, local ecologies and forgotten printmaking techniques, Heide Museum of Modern Art presents Habitus – a solo exhibition featuring the work of Rebecca Mayo.

For Habitus, Mayo has made a series of cloth sandbags printed using eighteenth century Toile de Jouy methods and dyes made from indigenous and introduced plants, which are stacked to form a wall in the exhibition space.

Under the gaze of Yingabeal – the Wurundjeri songline tree that has for centuries stood sentinel on the land, the sandbags symbolise an environmental crisis point and highlight the cumulative impact of everyday and habitual activities.

Rebecca Mayo is an Australian artist. Trained in printmaking, she draws upon its performative attributes of repetition and reiteration. She is particularly interested in how such repetitive processes might articulate or correspond with ways of thinking, being and acting. Similarly, the repetitive (and sometimes meditative) act of walking has become increasingly central to her practice.

Mayo principally examines relations and interactions between urban ecologically significant sites and people. Most recently she has been reactivating superseded printing and dyeing techniques using dye extracted from plants gathered at urban restoration sites (such as her local creek, The Merri, in Melbourne’s north). The resulting textiles are installed in situ or are re-introduced to the sites via her walking body or via the bodies of fellow restoration volunteers.

Rebecca Mayo: Habitus
Heide Museum of Modern Art, 7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen
Exhibition continues to 18 June 2017
Admission fees apply

For more information, visit: www.heide.com.au for details.

Image: Rebecca Mayo, Habitus (detail) 2017, Installation view, Courtesy of the artist – photo by Matthew Stanton