Page 57 - 2022-07-01VogueLivingar

VLife

THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT The Big
Rainbow Funhouse of Cosmic Brutality Part II
(2009) mixed media work; The Truth is Out
There (2015) wool needlepoint work; Spoils of
War (2015) textile appliqué work, all by Paul
Yore. OPPOSITE PAGE, FROM TOP Yas Queenie
(2020) needlepoint work; I am a man (2021)
needlepoint work, both by Kait James.

PAUL YORE

rucial to decoding the frenzied musings on late capitalism
and the high camp of Reformation Catholicism concealed
within the technicolour tease of Paul Yore’s tapestries, quilts
and sculptural installations, is his life story, which might
Cseem a tad early in the telling for an artist in his 30s.
PHOTOGRAPHERS: JOHN BRASH AND HEIDE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART (THE BIG RAINBOW FUNDHOUSE OF COSMIC BRUTALITY PART II);
But Yore is precociously talented. He began his art career with a solo
show at Heide Museum of Modern Art while still an undergraduate.
And his lived experience is panoramically wide, from missionary parents
to facing pornography charges for a show of his art in 2013. “They were
dismissed,” he says of the hysteria over taxpayers’ money feeding into the
“filth” of his commentary on sexual identity and cultural politics. “But that
was a really formative period for me artistically. Once I’d experienced
that low, the only way was up. I felt like I had free licence after that.”
Yore is a fiercely critical thinker whose majors in fine art, archaeology,
anthropology and Ancient Greek (which he reads and writes) manifest
in hyper-detailed, deceptively nostalgic, cubby house-cute assemblages
of the material artefacts that he excavates from an “irrational economic
system”. Read: he rearranges rubbish into revelatory truths.
DEVON ACKERMANN (THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE); DARREN SYLVESTER (SPOILS OF WAR)
These tiny little towers of Babel brim with the breadth of late-capitalism’s
crappy aestheticism, says Yore. “Those useless little toys from Happy
Meals, things found on the side of the road, the stuff sent to the op shop,”
all massed in “fantastical, counterfactual depictions of society” that
people seem to find joyful in spite of their deep, dark subtexts.
His textile works began more than 10 years ago, following a bad
mental health episode. Yore recalls ending up in a psychiatric ward,
heavily medicated and barely able to get out of bed. “I had some wool
with me, so I just started embroidering little needlepoints. I’d never
done any needlework before and it really helped me a lot; slowed down
my way of making and connected me to a whole different time frame.”
He soon expanded into quilting, an inherently reparative activity
that paralleled Yore’s built assemblages of scrap. “A stitch in time
saves nine,” he says of the labour-intensive work now readying for
Melbourne’s Rising festival and major survey show Word Made
Flesh at the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art in September.
“You cannot sew without thinking about repair and putting
something back together. For me it almost became a metaphor for
healing — the possibility of a new whole from fragmented paths.”
@paul.yore hugomichellgallery.com stationgallery.com.au

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