Margery Blackman: Weaving, Life

Margery Blackman: Weaving, Life surveys the life’s work of artist and textiles scholar Margery Blackman. Centring on the small yet significant oeuvre of woven tapestries that Blackman composed over a period of three decades, this exhibition brings many of Blackman’s larger works and public commissions together for the first time. A skilled colourist working with fibre, Blackman developed a distinctive abstract language that was unique in local weaving and the studio craft movement of Aotearoa during the late 1960-80s. Her approach to composition wove together an engaged awareness of local and international art history with a fundamental curiosity for the possibilities, restraints and histories of her own medium. This breadth of approach afforded a subtle conversation to evolve through her work – between her love of Te Waipounamu (South Island), the structures of cloth, pattern, landscape and the built environment, and her close study of historic and global textiles – to produce an oeuvre that is resolutely local while also contributing to the international story of modernist textiles in the 20th century.

From the mid-1960s on, Blackman began researching, writing, curating exhibitions, teaching public workshops and advocating for craft and cultural heritage at a local and national level. She was a founding member of the Dunedin Spinners and Weavers Guild (1971) and served periods on the editorial and education committees of the national body (NZSWWS), an elected member of the Crafts Council Executive (1981-83) and alongside husband Gary Blackman (1929-2022), a member of the Visual Arts Association and Friends of the Otago Museum. She began working with the collection of Tūhura Otago Museum from the late 1960s and during her tenure as Honorary Curator of Ethnographic Textiles (1988-1999), made an especially enduring contribution to local exhibition histories and public knowledge of global textile cultures. Margery Blackman: Weaving, Life provides and overview of the multi-faceted nature of Blackman’s career, highlighting the contributions she has made to textiles scholarship in Aotearoa and to arts communities throughout Aotearoa me Te Waipounamu.

Curated by Elle Loui August and Jane Groufsky with the support of Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage and Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum.

This exhibition was shown at Dunedin Public Art Gallery from 18 May 2024 until 13 October 2024.

Margery Blackman, b. 1930, Tapestry for Patricia, 1987, hand woven wool tapestry, 750mm x 620mm, Given by Margery Blackman in 2021, Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago, acc: V2021.07.1