Sparkly, frothy and white, there is something of the wedding-dress in Dani Marti’s latest subversions with rope. There are flowers, frills and dangling beads. There are feathers and pearls. But this being Marti, the story doesn’t end here. There is also taut, twisting rope and brazen sexual undercurrents. The story starts with the Spanish-Australian artist’s experiences with two men, one of whom Marti says he filmed on and off for four months. The artist describes these woven paintings and objects as representations of his subjects› a response to both “memory and interpretation” but — as with all his pieces — they are abstract and there is nothing in them to publicly even hint at the identity of his muses. All the more confronting then that he names them, immediately making the elegant, and sometimes phallic imagery, a more intimate affair. Marti sews caps of tiny, glistening glass pearls on the ends of a thick piece of cable and leaves a gaping hole in a wall piece of feathers and long looping lengths of industrial rope. He makes flowers by attaching glass pearls onto the centre of road reflectors that he melts so they become soft, wavy petals. Despite his repeat patterns and sometimes workaday-sounding materials there is a sense of grandness and emotional release. The naming of his subjects and the ambiguousness about any power plays between the Marti and his muses is pure theatre, a spectacle that in similar works in the past has prompted questions about voyeurism and exploitation. But there is also something of the more conventional tapestry in these pieces. The ropes and reflectors aren’t scavenged but pristine, the palette is tight and the final composition carefully construed. MB

Megan Backhouse

Video Link, ‘Book of Miracles, 2011

Review:

• Dan Rule, ‘Dani Marti: Book of Miracles’ THE AGE, LIfe & Style section, page 5, 30th July, Australia