Fahy Bottrell The Original Original
Fahy Bottrell is one of the great originals of Australian art. There is little public evidence of her work – two major tapestries commissioned for the New South Wales Parliament House, a mural in the Consolidated Press building in Park Street – but this is less to do with carelessness on the part of curators and more due to Fahy’s unconventional approach to what art can be. She is an anarchist, someone who did not believe in commercial exhibitions but in creativity as a life principle. So, writing about Fahy, trying to explain why she is such a force of nature, so inspiring, is not a straightforward task. “Sensibility is an area in which artists feel at ease,” she once wrote, “but in which scholars and interpreters often find themselves lost.”
Born in 1927, she grew up in the Riverina in the Depression. After serving in World War II she was a Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme student at East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School). She worked as a textile designer for Claudio Alcorso’s silk and textiles company in Tasmania, as a colour controller at the Bradford Dye Works, travelled in India researching Gandhi’s cottage industries, and worked as an in 1973, and in 1980), and for the first Sydney Festival in 1977 she staged a month-long residency in which dozens of artists used market stalls as their studios at Haymarket. Since 1965, she has lived in Matcham in a house full of her art – works in wool, thread, fabric and paper – and which, with its foil-lined bathroom and tissue-paper wall-sized screens, is an artwork in itself.
