Narelle Jubelin

Narelle Jubelin (born 1960) is an Australian artist who has lived and practiced in Madrid since 1996. Jubelin's often collaborative work spans across media such as sculpture, printmaking, multi-media installation and is especially focused on single thread petit point stitching. Her work is held in the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art, and The Commercial Gallery, Sydney. Her work brings attention to themes of cultural exchange, feminine labour, modernism and Australian feminism, architecture in 1983.

It has been said that Jubelin's use of petit point needlework to recreate architectural forms and landscapes responds to the non-expressive typologies of late Modernism, particularly to the works of Bernd and Hilla Becher.

In 1985, Jubelin co-founded Firstdraft Gallery in Sydney. The use of women's hobby and domestic craft is central to this artwork and most of Jubelin's other works, as it is said to reject the traditional hierarchical value system of art mediums and instead centres women's labour in a gallery space. Trade Delivers People addresses cultural exchange and colonialism, and the way signs and symbols of local cultures are globally exploited, rendering them foreign. Using petit point works that seek to connect Chicago and Australia, Soft Shoulder addresses issues of identity at the heart of cultural production and questions what a universal sense of belonging and home actually is.

Case No. T961301 was first exhibited at the Tate Liverpool Gallery in 1998. The work consisted of two suspended stainless steel, round tables, set with textual transcripts, cutlery, petit points and photographs. The transcripts and other objects directly link to four English women activists, known as the "Ploughshares Four", who destroyed an aircraft that was set to be deployed in East Timor. As a peacekeeping effort, the women attacked the plane with cutlery and other mundane implements. It is suggested that this exhibition consisting of the readymade seeks to address colonialism and cultural exchange like many of Jubelin's work. The work has been criticised by author Sean Cubitt for its lack of tactility in response to the tactical work of the Ploughshares Four. Cubitt states that "Jubelin's problem is to make a work that is as successful as that, [The Ploughshares Four] and she fails." He says that the physicality of the Ploughshares Four is not present in the work, and that a gallery space can never equal the "urgency of the tactician". However, it is stated that the work can help to remember the achievements of the past.

Solo exhibitions 2016

Primitive Flamenco, The Commercial Gallery, Sydney

2013

Vision in Motion, Samstag Museum, University of South Australia, Adelaide

Vision in Motion, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne

2003

Duration Houses, Mori Gallery, Sydney

1987

Re-presenting His Story, Institute of Technology, Architecture Faculty Gallery, Sydney Jubelin, Narelle. Afterimage. Madrid: La Casa Ecendida. 2012. Jubelin, Narelle. Soft Shoulder. Chicago: University of Chicago, Renaissance Society. 1994. King, Natalie, Narelle Jubelin and Jacky Redgate. Soft and Slow. Victoria: Monash University Gallery. 1995. Stephen, Ann and Narelle Jubelin. Cannibal Tours. Victoria: Heide Museum of Modern Art. 2009. Nolan, Sydney. Early Experiments With Narelle Jubelin. Victoria: Heide Museum of Modern Art. 2012. Conroy, Diana Wood. Fabrics of Change, Changing Identities: An Exhibition with Artists Narelle Jubelin, Osmond Kantilla, Kay Lawrence, Nadia Myre, John Dule. New South Wales: University of Wollongong. 2004.