Wash and War

Olive Bishop’s Wash and War is a series of ceramic army jackets adorned with hand-built medals and other symbols made not long after the end of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Wash and War came from the feeling of regimentation in the making and wearing of clothing, which reaches its ultimate expression in the army uniform. A play on the words 'wash and wear', the title suggests the cycle of use and re-use and the endless cycle of war.

Olive Bishop’s work belongs to a loosely defined Adelaide art movement of the 1970s, dubbed Skangaroovian Funk ceramics. These artists revived studio craft to make satire and express ideas in unconventional ways, working in an anti-art, anti-establishment style. Their small, often garish sculptures broke with established practices of pottery and craft and were neither functional or necessarily aesthetic and made statements about society.

Works from the Wash and War series created between 1976 and 1977 are held in other institutional collections, including Art Gallery of South Australia, and National Gallery of Australia. Wash and War and Half Dress Suit were for a time hung together in the Dunstan Playhouse Foyer.

Olive Bishop trained as a nurse and has been involved with ceramic work since 1966. She travelled widely and exhibited throughout Australia.