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Details
- Date
- 1979
- Media category
- Materials used
- colour screenprint on thin white wove paper
- Dimensions
- 72.8 x 48.0 cm image; 79.1 x 51.3 cm sheet
- Credit
- Purchased 1981
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 175.1981.4
- Copyright
- © Marie McMahon and Frances (Budden) Phoenix with the Women's Domestic Needlework Group
- Artist information
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Women's Domestic Needlework Group, Sydney
Works in the collection
- Artist information
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Marie McMahon
Works in the collection
- Artist information
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Frances Phoenix
Works in the collection
- Share
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About
This poster is filled with imagery emphasising the impact of the industrial revolution on the textile industry and, subsequently, the lives of women. Two photographs are reproduced. One shows a group of women working in a 1930s 'sweatshop' and another shows an isolated 'outworker' hunched over her sewing machine in her Melbourne home, surrounded by garments to be stitched. The cogs and wheels of manufacturing engulf them, symbolising the loss of control women have sustained in the production and use of textiles, due to industrialisation and mechanisation.
The aim of the Women's Domestic Needlework Group was to highlight the devaluation of the complex skills and knowledge handed down through generations of women, only to be replaced by mass-produced goods made by unskilled labourers.
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Exhibition history
Shown in 4 exhibitions
Project 39 - Women's Imprint (1982), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 01 Oct 1982–31 Oct 1982
See you at the barricades, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 30 May 2015–29 Nov 2015
Ewa Pachucka 'Arcadia: Landscape and bodies', Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 03 Mar 2018–29 Apr 2018
20th-Century galleries, lower level 1 (rehang), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 20 Aug 2022–2023
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Bibliography
Referenced in 2 publications
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Macushla Robinson, See you at the barricades, Sydney, 2015, 12 (illus.), 47. illustration is a detail
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Anna Waldmann, Project 39 - Women's Imprint, Sydney, 1982. no catalogue numbers; not paginated
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