David Noo­nan
Tapes­tries

Draw­ing from the breadth of his modes of pro­duc­tion, David Noo­nan com­bines numer­ous art and craft tech­niques, both his­tor­i­cal and con­tem­po­rary, includ­ing tapes­try, col­lage, and man­u­al print­ing meth­ods for his new series of works in ​‘Tapes­tries’. For the exhi­bi­tion, Noo­nan has cre­at­ed a series of jacquard tapes­tries in col­lab­o­ra­tion with weavers in Flan­ders, Bel­gium, where tapes­tries have been made since the 16^th cen­tu­ry. Invent­ed in 1801, the Jacquard loom com­bines tra­di­tion­al hand made meth­ods with con­tem­po­rary dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy. Le Cor­busier called tapes­tries ​‘nomadic murals’ with their sta­tus shift­ing between folk and fine art, as well as between impe­r­i­al sta­tus sym­bol and indus­tri­al­ly pro­duced furnishing.

Noonan’s ear­ly col­lage works embraced a rough, ​‘DIY’ aes­thet­ic, which has been increas­ing­ly refined through­out his prac­tice, evolv­ing into high­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed and seam­less image lay­er­ing. In stark con­trast to the flu­id image repro­duc­tion capa­bil­i­ties of tapes­try, Noo­nan recalls ear­ly rough-cut col­lag­ing in these works, util­is­ing the sophis­ti­cat­ed lan­guage of tapes­try to con­trast with abrupt­ly lay­ered, hand-cut designs. Reduc­ing the palette to cool grayscale draws imme­di­ate ref­er­ences to the rough aes­thet­ics of Xerox, strip­ping the imagery of nos­tal­gia and cre­at­ing a tem­po­ral ambi­gu­i­ty. Noo­nan extends and expands his ongo­ing inter­est in com­bin­ing fig­u­ra­tion with abstrac­tion, util­is­ing tra­di­tion­al hand cut paper col­lage to iso­late the fig­ures, as dis­tinct­ly fore­ground, on abstract backgrounds.

Both the fig­u­ra­tive and abstract images are from wide­ly dis­parate sources and peri­ods in time, but have been con­struct­ed to feel uni­fied and part of the same mood and aes­thet­ic land­scape. Con­sis­tent with Noonan’s prac­tice, the sources are not revealed but are rather decon­tex­tu­alised to allow the exhibition’s nar­ra­tive to form in the present. The com­po­si­tion and aes­thet­ic lan­guage of the works are inspired by Noo­nan’s ongo­ing inter­est in counter-cul­ture in both the­atre and per­for­mance, as well as the graph­ic design of the under­ground press.