A Tangerine Dream

Janet Brereton’s larger-than-life macramé knot portrait of the popular German experimental electronic rock band, Tangerine Dream, was purchased for the Works of Art Collection in 1978. Fabric and textiles are well-represented in Adelaide Festival Centre’s art acquisitions and exhibitions of the 1970s and 1980s. During this time, Brereton was a prominent artist at the forefront of a re-examination of textile art coinciding with feminist historians’ rewriting women’s stories.

Brereton was known for her large-scale tapestry representations of heads. Her portraits are based on photographs, which she simplified by transposing onto a grid. The image is knotted into the structure of the fabric, rather than imposed on the surface and therefore physically part of the work. These works are immensely heavy and would have taken considerable strength to produce because of their enormous scale and the physicality.

Brereton was at the forefront of creating an awareness of textile art in Australia. She established a tapestry workshop in 1969, and produced a tapestry almost every year from then until 1991. Her work is represented in other major public collections including the Powerhouse Museum and Queensland Gallery of Modern Art.