Barbie Kjar

Fishnets
28 February to 16 March 1999

This exhibition focuses on fishing nets, and handbags/gloves (as a metaphor for people's lives, specifically women's lives).  Nets and handbags are containers which are holders of mysteries and secrets. I am equally interested in the contents of the bags and nets as I am with the outer structures and forms.  There is a rich mythology associated with nets and bags. The net is used as a symbol of mankind's attempts to capture enlightenment. It is a structure formed of the visible and the invisible.

The Olympian myth of Aphrodite and Ares focuses on a net of bronze, which was made so thin by Hephaestus as to be invisible. The plan was to capture Aphrodite and Ares in the act of love and Hephaestus (Aphrodite's husband) called upon all Olympians to witness the encaptured lovers.

I visited a net making factory in Margate, five lometres from where I live at Kingston Beach. I collected samples of different textured nets and was amazed to see five men working together making a large net - the net itself covered the space of a large warehouse.  At this factory I also saw examples of wonderful circular shaped scallop nets - the hoops inside are similar to the hoops I depicted in the girl's games series (Hoola-hooping I & II) as well as being the same shape as the eye, the cut, the vagina shape inside the bulls from the bull series of 1992. The actual structures of the nets also have other associations of the organic forms in nature, the gourd, the bowl, and of inorganic fantastic forms like space ships, even condoms.

There is a life; a history contained in the nets as there is a parallel to handbags. I like the idea of the random or chance element of casting a net, sometimes the contents will be full, rich, other times, close to empty, like the cycles of life. The net then becomes the material in fine gloves or the material which traditionally falls from stylish hats, slightly hiding a woman's face it is almost a sign of seduction, a signal to a lover. In the 16th century, gloves were a common gift given by male suitors to their lovers. Women's hands fit into gloves, and they can almost be symbols of hands.

The handbag is a symbol of women's loves they contain mysteries and secrets and memories they mark different stages in a woman's life they can also refer to different social occasions some are practical, others have beautiful forms and textured surfaces - they can be made from fur,  or lizard or crocodile, or glomesh or lace or beads, the forms are as varied as forms in nature and reflect different fashions.   The contents of the handbag are as intriguing as the exterior form.  They reveal the kind of woman who is the owner. Look at the lipstick, the compact, the notes, the letters, stamps, coins, condom, paper, panadol, keys, pens etc. Keys are an axial symbol which includes all powers of opening and closing, binding and loosing. The key also denotes liberation, knowledge and the mysteries; initiation.

I have formed a ladder between nets and handbags. Several images show fish in handbags, or fish jumping out of a handbag onto a woman's body and around her neck, returning to the handbag - so there is an element of the surreal and the sensuous in this work. Fish are a symbol of fecundity and of the life giving properties of water; they also represent life in the depths, the unconscious.

Barbie Kjar
Hobart, February 1999

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