In a mezzanine-level studio accessible via a precarious metal staircase, in an old factory building on Brisbane’s southside, Jeanette Stok has been expanding on an art practice that began in 2013 when she first merged her career as a scientific researcher with her role as daughter and granddaughter of accomplished Dutch sewers. After noticing how counted-thread needlework mirrored DNA in its use of minimal linked strands to produce a multitude of different patterns, Stok began experimenting with mass-produced industrial products to see if she could replicate the traditional craft techniques that had been passed down her matrilineal line. The result is testament to both the scientific and familial spheres, and a way to understand tradition from an untraditional standpoint. 

The beauty of Stok’s idiosyncratic artwork is in the detail. Simple materials including metal and wire are transformed into intricate patterns inspired by Northern European embroidery such as Hardanger stitching, a common language for the women in her family. While sewing, she considers the repetitive physical movements that are integral to both artmaking and laboratory research. Her hands move with the same quiet rhythm as her mother and grandmothers’ hands before her, a transportive process she also documents in her drawings and animations to explore topics of memory, womanhood, biology and heritage.

As her assemblages have grown Stok has gravitated to more pliable materials like plastic gutter guard and garden ties. These add a futuristic, minimalist vibe to her practice and allow her to play with designs that exist purely for fun. Margy’s dress (2023), a wearable art piece made for a close friend, features weaving patterns reminiscent of Spanish Blackwork but evokes a kind of intergalactic bondage costume made of lace and leather. 

Most recently, Stok has been contemplating domestic spaces, and what allows a house to become a home. Working with flyscreen, nylon fishing line and stainless steel swivels, Stok has reimagined household napery and window dressings as intimate and subversive sculptural pieces that retain the fluidity of linen despite the rigidity of the materials. Bordered with fine filigree, their delicate domesticity belies the fact their separate components are used by hunters to capture prey. 

The industrial location of KEPK’s creative spaces isn’t perhaps the first place you might think to locate an art practice steeped in matriarchal craft traditions, yet it is against this background of exposed metal beams and corrugated iron where Stok’s works come into their own. Combining materials of heavy industry with our own deeply ingrained associations with textiles and handicrafts, she opens up a dialogue about the weight of cultural inheritance, forms of labour, and the values, both financial and social, that we assign them. 

Jeanette Stok: Become
19 – 25 October 2023
KEPK Gallery, Brisbane

Commissioned October 2023.