Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH

Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH is an extensive survey exhibition encompassing the full scope of the artist’s work, and includes a major new room-scaled installation developed especially for the exhibition.

Continuing ACCA’s Australian solo series which highlights the work of significant and influential contemporary Australian artists, WORD MADE FLESH is constructed maximally as a gesamtkunstwerk, presenting work from the past fifteen years, including appliquéd quilts and needlework, banners and pendants, collage and assemblage, and large-scale mixed media installations.

Paul Yore is one of Australia’s most thought-provoking and consequential multidisciplinary artists. Born in Naarm/Melbourne in 1987, he lives and works on Gunaikurnai Country in Gippsland, Victoria, and completed his studies in painting, archaeology and anthropology at Monash University in 2010. Yore’s work engages with the histories of religious art and ritual, queer identity, pop-culture and neo-liberal capitalism, recasting a vast array of found images, materials and texts into sexually and politically loaded tableaux and assemblages which celebrate hybrid and fluid identities, unstable and contradictory meanings, and the glowing horizon of queer worldmaking.

Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH is structured around five purpose-designed spaces presenting specific bodies of work and discursive contexts: Signs; Embodiment; Manifesto; The Horizon; and Word Made Flesh. This itinerary articulates two key trajectories in the artist’s work: the first charting the development of Yore’s textile practice, beginning with small, embroidered works through to large-scale appliquéd quilts, which variously draw on the traditions of classical Greek art, decorative Flemish and French tapestries, trashy pop-culture, gay porn, cartoons, psychedelia, narrative and history painting, as well as the decorative semantic excesses of rococo style.

The second trajectory is represented in a new kaleidoscopic, architecturally-scaled installation, anarchically composed of improvised makeshift structures, mixed media sculpture and found objects, collage and assemblage, painting, video, sound and light. This immersive installation imagines a queer alternative reality, erected from the wasteland of the Anthropocene, performatively implicating itself into the debased spectacle of hyper-capitalist society.

Yore has exhibited widely since the early 2000s, with notable individual exhibitions including SEEING IS BELIEVING BUT FEELING IS THE TRUTH, Rising, Golden Square, Melbourne, 2022; Let Them Eat Cake, Neon Parc, Melbourne, 2021; Pleasures Against Nature, RMIT Project Space and Spare Room, Melbourne, 2020; Let the World Burn, Textile Art Museum Australia, Ararat, 2019; It’s All Wrong but It’s Alright, Dark Mofo, Black Temple Gallery, Hobart, 2019; Paul Yore, NADA, Miami Beach, Florida, 2016; Boys Gone Wild, Studio 12, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 2012; The Big Rainbow Funhouse of Cosmic Brutality Part 2, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2009.

Recent group exhibitions include Queer: Stories from the NGV Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2022; SOFT_WARE: Textiles after Technology, Kunsthaus Erfurt, Germany, 2020; Exhibition Colectiva, Galeria Casa Colon, Yucatan, Mexico, 2020; Misfit: Collage and Queer Practice, National Art School, Sydney, 2020; 16th International Triennal of Tapestry: Breaching Borders, Centralne Muzeum Włókiennictwa, Łódź, Poland, 2019; London Summer Intensive, Camden Arts Centre, London, UK, 2019; RIJSWIJK TEXTILE BIENNIAL, Rijswijk Museum, Rijswijk, Netherlands, 2019; National Anthem, Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne, 2019; and Craftivism. Dissident Objects and Subversive Forms, Shepparton Art Museum, 2019.

Yore has been a recipient of numerous awards and residencies including an Australia Council Arts Project Grant, 2022; Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, 2015–16; Artspace Studio Residency, Sydney, 2014; Geumcheon Residency, Seoul, 2013; Gertrude Contemporary Studio Residency, 2012–11; and the Alliance Française Prize, 2009.

To accompany the exhibition, a major monographic publication is forthcoming, published in partnership with Art Ink, which includes an extensive interview with the artist and essays and texts by leading Australian and international artists, scholars and commentators.

Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH

Curator: Max Delany, in collaboration with Paul Yore and Devon Ackermann