Joolz: I wear my heart on my tee exhibition

Friday, March 4, 2011

I wear my heart on my tee exhibition

So, last night saw the launch of the Town Hall Gallery's third I Wear My Heart On My Tee exhibition, a yearly event showing off tshirt designers' works. This celebration of all things tee illustrates how much we use a tshirt to say things about ourselves - political statements or cute pictures? I think my personal collection tends towards the latter, although - horror of horrors from a tshirt designer's perspective - I actually have a lot of plain tees - yes'm, without any embellishment at all! What can I say, I'm a jewellery designer - sometimes I like a blank canvas to show that stuff off.

As well as having all the walls covered in tees, there was a long table in the middle with extra items that could be picked up and purchased on the night. Great idea to help out those 'struggling artistes'! One issue that was mentioned on the night was that it was a shame that the colours tended to be grouped together on the walls. Eg one wall section had all red tees, another had all grey ones, etc. I thought originally that it was quite a pleasing composition, but as it was pointed out to me last night, it meant that you didn't look as closely at each individual tshirt design. Ahhh, very true!

Mardi Nowak, curator, tells us of her love of tees

I went along to check out the work of local Aussie designers T-Shirt Garage, Tomorrow Never Knows and Ruffbat Creative, and also got to check out some new names I hadn't heard of before: Well, Almost Human, Silly Pear, Bike Path, Maru design, Amy Canal, Persistently Plastic, Bronze Temple, Indie, Bad meets Evil, 7 Breaths, Best Fiend, Georgia Thorpe, EDAR, Jessica Dib-Newberry, Grumpy Tommi, Ray L Design, Freyart, Malamoop, Ging...er Ellie, Kristy Brown, & Yvette Phipps. Lots of good stuff!

A great night was had by all, always good to see local galleries showing some interesting works. I have to admit I have been increasing the collection of tees with some sort of iconography on the front, but I'm still pretty attached to a plain tee that I can mess about with, too. Pass me the scissors!