Paul Yore

Paul Yore (b. 1987) is a queer Australian artist who works in needlecraft traditions such as embroidery, quilting and tapestry. Yore is interested in ancient cultures and symbols–signification itself–and, in his early twenties, he studied anthropology and archaeology at Monash University.[1] Human culture, history and hand crafts informs Yore’s bricolage practice. He obsessively gathers images, symbols, phrases, consumer products and discarded objects, trawled from ‘the sewer of collective culture’,[2] to remix into kitsch constellations reflective of contemporary society.

Let us not die from habit (2018) is a four-metre-long riot of colour, text, references and repurposed scraps, appliquéd and pieced together as a quilt. For Yore, quilts hold a special kind of allegorical power:

Historically, quilts served as blankets, especially in times of economic hardship. They were made from any mismatching fabric that could be found. In this way, quilting retains a strong connection to resourcefulness and material necessity. Conceptually, as a queer artist, this connects to the idea of the quilt as an item of survival and urgency, as well as comfort and safety.[3]

The decorative practice of appliqué, whereby material swatches and cut pieces are sewn onto a base fabric, is used by Yore as an archaeological method. Let us not die from habit is like ‘a web that has been cast across the wasteland of culture, catching all kinds of flotsam and jetsam upon its surface, ensnaring multiple possible meanings, which seemingly struggle in vain and become entangled.’[4] Yore’s references are wide-ranging. Slogans like ‘jobs and growth’ and ‘family values’, often trotted out by Australian politicians during election cycles, jostle against familiar brands–Coca-Cola–and popular culture icons like Bugs Bunny or Bart Simpson. From biblical acts to the lawns of Parliament House, skulls, phalluses, animals, plants, even Aboriginal artworks pepper these scenes. At the centre of the quilt, an infantilised fall of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, leads to a punkish take on Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People. Where the bare-chested revolutionary Liberté should be is instead a censored, nude figure flying an upside-down Pride flag, which itself bears an Antifa insignia and inverted pink triangle – a reprised historical symbol of homosexuality. Yore’s cacophonous, flattened field of trawled signs is, quite literally, ‘hanging together by a thread’.[5]

Let us not die of habit illuminates the tension between Yore’s queer identity and institutional power, whether that be the ‘nuclear’ family, the church, the police state or the multi-national corporation.[6] Given Yore’s iconoclastic and, at times, controversial subject matter, he also employs ‘crassness, camp decoration, low-brow political satire, jokes’ and puns to make his works more universal.[7] He explains, ‘My work tries to capture an emotional intensity, oscillating between delight and desolation, in many ways a reflection of how one experiences the world, which is complicated and bewildering.’[8]

Similarly, Let us not die from habit oscillates between the speed of twenty-first century material culture–mass production, digital distribution, the 24-hour news cycle–and the mediative catharsis and careful tending of hand work: ‘…the needle and thread necessitate a slow thoughtfulness, their preindustrial logic offering a counterpoint to the distracted immediacy of digital culture, with its swiping, scrolling and clicking into oblivion.’[9]