SOPHIE MUNNS  -  thinking on textiles:
The impulse to paint large ‘narrative’ cloths, at once symbolic, decorative and informative, is not new for artist Sophie Munns. Introduced to batik whilst studying the language of Australia’s northern neighbour Indonesia when a 15 yr old student awakened a passion for textiles that picked up again after graduating Art School with a B ED (Art) in 1980. Secondary school teaching brought time for focus on fabric design, as did home studio time, inspired by textile printing, fabric painting and alternative fashion directions of leading creatives of the era. Sophie’s explorations in printing, dying and painting fabric produced a series of clothing, surface design and cloth applications, a practice interrupted by relocation to London for work and travel in 1986 and resumed on resettling in Melbourne, Australia in 1989.
Large works on cloth in 1991-92 featured new design ideas as well as lino-blocks produced in 80‘s classrooms, discarded by students, only to be reworked later by the artist. Early lino-cuts had featured sea life found in the coastal fishing community where Sophie had worked, early 90‘s lino-cuts however reflected Mediterranean travels, ancient Sicilian designs, various Greek motifs such as the Octopus, and an appreciated for the culture of food and table. A collection of simple lino-block motifs accumulated over three decades of periodic lino-work,   highlights a dimension of Sophie’s abiding interest in motif and metaphor.
In 2012 once again the artist returned to working on cloth, using lino-cut motifs based on rainforest Seed capsules created during an October Residency at Cairns Botanic Gardens in Far North Queensland, Australia that year. Delving into the extraordinary World Heritage Wet Tropics Rainforests, making motifs of fruits and seeds of the forest, whilst connecting with local indigenous people from the oldest surviving Rainforest culture on the planet was indeed formative. Seed motifs were applied in rhythmic layers onto unframed linen cloths, abstract patterning intimating a sense of ‘Long Time’, through seed imagery shown in perpetual cycles of coming into being, falling away and being reborn.

Living in Queensland since 2008 has offered viewings of cultural artifacts of indigenous peoples from across mainland Australia, the Torres Strait Islands of the north, and Island cultures of the Pacific. Access to superb examples of ethno-botanically layered artifacts and contemporary pieces from this continent and the Pacific reveal work congruent with its bio-regional and cultural context. Cairns in particular was a key experience, being something of a gateway to Pacific Islands as well as northern Australia, and itself home to vibrant biologically diverse habitats, plant and seed material, indigenous communities and science institutions like the Australian Tropical Herbarium where I was able to connect with several scientists.
In 2013 Sophie undertook to bring a far deeper focus to textiles through her ongoing Homage to the Seed project, first launched when 2010 Artist-in-Residence at Brisbane Botanic Gardens. Exploring biologically and culturally diverse heritages across the globe from epochs past and present, considering the climates and landscapes shaping those cultures, Sophie hoped to highlight the age-old relationship of people to plants, to comment on how textile traditions carry profound interactions between humans and nature, and have long been imbued with deep cultural knowledge and values. She considered ‘Cloth’ as a domestic and ceremonial work of art, a transportable item for nomadic peoples and those who’ve migrated or moved often... and cloth as a sustainable domestic and cultural item in contemporary life.
Probably best known among textile traditions in the southern hemisphere approximate to Australia are the Tapa cloths. Sophie’s interest stems from the way they incorporate folklore, religion, culture, and ritual and can inspire an intense feeling for the value of ritual, cultural practice and remembrance ... something Sophie sought to bring to her series of cloth artworks. In the first very large 'Homage to the seed' cloth of 2013 motifs were assembled from various eras of Sophie’s practice, personal yet universal motifs intimating the phenomena of cultural expression across time and space. 
In 2013 artworks on paper, stretched canvas and large unframed linen cloths merged organic with geometric, science with nature, often working in a painterly manner as well as employing old and new lino-motifs. Leaving spaces between complex juxtaposed and over-lapping motifs, adding decorative elements such as dots representing seeds recalled time spent in seed labs counting tiny seeds. The aim of the Cloth works was not to emulate Tapa cloths, but to serve as a kind of visual holding place for motifs representing species, histories, botanic and cultural meanings, to communicate something of the infinite, the continuous thread of nature... its eternal cycles and rhythms.

This brings us to 2014 and the three artworks showing here at Mobilia Gallery. Evolved from works on cloth from the previous years, however, here a slightly different approach has been adopted. Previous cloths were structured through the printing of Lino-cut motifs with layering and details added in afterwards in a painterly manner.
In ‘Homage to our common inheritance’. a slow painstaking approach has been applied to this more colourful and complex of the three works. The size of this work, 2 m x 1 m,  created challenge for the artist in terms of compositional balance and rhythm. Thematically it refers to the vast legacy of seed forms from the world over. Attention has been given to abundant motifs referring to the plant kingdom, and contemplation of seeds likely to inspire symbolic motifs and even past motifs, patterns and visual languages around the globe.
Every motif a meditation in ‘our common inheritance’, natures gift to us, which, for the past 5 years the artist has spent innumerable hours researching, whilst working and corresponding with Seed Scientists and Conservationists at leading global institutions, contending with the gravity of species loss and what can, is and might be done to counter this unprecedented loss. Latest figures released in early October by WWF suggest we’ve lost 50% of the planet’s biodiversity in the last 40 years... a truly sobering fact that this cloth may well bring to mind but does not leave us dwelling on!
The other two works ‘Antipodean Inheritance I & II’ are represented in a very different palette, and speak to the diversity of plant species from the Australian continent most familiar to the artist who’s spent most of her 56 years living in a number of regions on the East coast of Australia, between the northern capital of Queensland, Brisbane, and the southern capital of Victoria, Melbourne. 
In May, 2014 Sophie spent a 2 week Artist Residency at Plantbank, at the Australian Botanic Gardens in SW Sydney, NSW. A newly opened Seed Research facility, partner project to the Australian Seedbank Partnership and Kew Garden’s Millennium Seedbank Project, it brought another ‘chapter’ to the ‘Homage to the Seed’ project. New seed material and information flows in constantly to her Art Practice and various projects across Education, Public Engagement and Design Project Sectors that Sophie is involved in. 
The  ‘Antipodean Inheritance’ Cloths pay tribute to the great many Australian species she has been drawn to investigate, pods, seed capsules and seeds of endlessly varied dimensions and characteristics, collected in numerous habitats and urban settings, on residencies, in discussions, through research and so on. Now in the 5th year of this project, with a series of remarkable residency experiences that includes Kew Garden’s Millennium Seedbank in the UK behind her, Sophie is now only more committed to the undertaking stated in her initial proposal for this project in 2009... to champion the humble seed. May these celebratory textile works bring to all a simple reminder ...
                                                                                                                                 “... at the center of everything we know is the matter of seeds.”
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Sophie Munns