Irene Manion

Irene Manion works in a range of media including textiles, photography, watercolour and digital graphics.

Celebrating local birds and insects, her work expresses her deep awareness of the interconnections between all life forms and the environment.

Pushing the stitched medium in new and untraditional directions, her textile techniques include dye-sublimation printing, machine and hand embroidery and appliqué on various surfaces including Perspex.

My obsession with birds as subject matter started many years ago when I discovered the presence of families of rainbow lorikeets in a line of tree alongside a busy urban railway station in South Sydney. At dusk the trees were filled with the raucous, strident almost deafening bird sounds that coincided daily with the setting of the sun.

On my regular walks in my new neighbourhood of Lake Macquarie, NSW, I always carry my camera with telephoto lens at the ready, in case I sight local birds, and especially birds in flight. So many scenarios present themselves such as the time I captured a murder of crows invading the nest of distraught noisy miners, or when a family of galahs hung upside down from telegraph wires during a torrential storm. So much has recently been uncovered about the intelligence and behaviours of birds in academic research. My focus on birds can be a celebration of their beauty and personality, usually in the watercolours and photos. They can also appear as symbols in personal narratives or as conceptual statements relating to environmental issues.

My medium of choice is textiles.  The versatility of this medium has always been enticing to me. Initially my work was entirely in the batik technique which was employed to explore the NSW Blue Mountains landscape.  Over time, my interests and knowledge of textile media have evolved and currently dyeing, transfer printing, machine and hand embroidery as surface embellishment dominate my work.

Editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator are also employed to manipulate design elements in preparation for the final image. The completed designs are generally dye-sublimated onto fabric. The printed fabric is then further embroidered.

After completing numerous workshops in machine embroidery in the 70s and 80s, I slowly developed a unique stitching technique that came about as the result of trying to recreate the patterns of barbs on feathers. I was inspired by the way the embroidery module on my sewing machine moved considerable distances to create stitches in precise patterns. By stitching slowly and pulling the fabric extended distances between the needle entries, I was able to develop my unique long-stitch technique. This technique resembles hatching and crosshatching in lithographs and ink drawings, and bears similarity to traditional Japanese hand embroidery techniques, used to embellish Obis. Light at various angles captures the sheen of each line of thread and illuminates the surface, reflecting the rhythm and pattern of the stitches. An embroidered fabric changes considerably when moved, or when the viewer moves, as the lighting reflects uniquely at different angles and levels of luminosity.

Transparency in my textile pieces generally refers to the disappearing richness of our physical world. More bird and insect species are facing extinction than ever before, and even more are in decline as climate crises multiply at an accelerating rate. Transparency can also symbolise the 'fading' memories of what we had/knew in the past.

I have been exhibiting my textile work for the past thirty years in numerous group, selective and solo exhibitions in Australia and overseas. My work is many private collections.

A secondary Visual Arts teacher and head teacher for a considerable number of years, I also taught photography and video production.