What is frequently perceived as most potently "real" is one's inner mental world, and if there are missing pieces here, it requires a substantial effort to accept the impossibility of their recovery, and functionally accommodate this regardless.

Because I am new to Western Australia, I am discovering the work of local artists who have been practitioners for some time, as well as those who are "emerging".  My lack of familiarity with their evolution as artists means that almost everyone's work is "new" to me, making my responses essentially ahistoric, and if you like, "fresh".  My own background as artist/maker as well as occasional writer on art means that I will always be interested in how a work has been put together in every sense. My own history means that I have viewed and considered many different kinds of art from many different cultural and national traditions. And my personality is such that my comments on the work of others will be filtered through a certain amount of "first sight" geniality. This constitutes a bias in my thinking and writing, in favour of the contextual as well as the formal when it comes to appreciating and analysing art.

Antoinette Carrier is one of the first "unknown" artists whom I met on arriving here just over a year ago. I saw a small exhibition of her colourful, figurative tapestries at Kulcha in association with the "I'm not a racist but....." Symposium there, and from her paper gained an insight into the particular personal, experiential, psychological and intellectual issues with which she was grappling in her art and writing.

Thirty years ago or more Antoinette came to Australia as a teenager, from Asia in the days before Aboriginals were citizens in their own land, and when "The White Australia Policy" prevailed, despite our national rhetoric regarding Australia's International allegiance to the Commonwealth of Nations.  This created for her many memories of dislocation and "otherness", and a powerful sense of loss - the loss of her formative Malaysian self, containing within it a diverse cultural richness, a tropical abundance taken for granted experientially but impossible to transplant, impossible to fully manifest again, and slipping ever further back into memory with every passing moment.  In a desire to pursue her education, Antoinette would also have been working against some extremely powerful stereotypes regarding Asian women and their lot, widely prevalent in Australia at that time.  The consequential inconsistencies of such memories might take a lifetime to integrate, and also might provide a reason to achieve intellectually - to tease out and set down one's own reasons why.  For all its problems, its alienating potential, this condition became instead a healthy driving force for creative expression.  All aspects of this exhibition clearly show the artist's need to push this integration, her creativity and the "mindfulness" of her enquiry.

Reading the catalogue as well as viewing the tapestries is a must in this exhibition. The essays bring an almost scientific approach to aspects of Carrier's pursuit of memory and its constructs.  Its inconsistencies and incompletions are like ghosts which haunt her, and which having first understood, she desires to banish. So determined is she to differentiate between nostalgia and the psychology of loss that she is almost too thorough, leaving little to the viewer's imagination, closing off ambivalence with quiet determination, and with it the parameters for interpretation.  Although quiet in tone, it is clearly her need which we witness in this exhibition -  her journey, and her views - a completed enquiry.

Like ghosts, the works exhibited are semi-transparent, having a luminosity and glow achieved by the weaving materials used - shiny polypropylene twine, clear cling-wrap, silk, shredded silver-gelatine on paper, phosphorescent yarn, light - everything which encourages our perceptions of the insubstantial, of a shifting reflexivity, the ever elusive quality of memory, of things which are, and then are not.  Where we stand determines what we see.  Notations appear as text panels for a story-cloth,
suspended slightly in front of the woven cloth surface, whose structure is also its dominant texture and contains in its weave the marks of its images.  Story-cloths have traditional references in Malaysia, a celebration of its great tradition of woven textiles, of epic narrative and ritual use.  Carrier calls upon all these references here, but in a highly abstract way.

Her story-cloths are autobiographical, composed of remembered fragments from the inhabited spaces of her childhood; sets of signifiers for the events of that childhood - beams, eaves, steps, and garden corners from former houses - mnemonics really, which are explained in detail in the essays.  The layers of notations are variously printed on clear fused supports over the woven tapestry, printed photographically over the structural mesh of resin paper, then re-woven, or digitally imaged and dyed into it, so that they blur, blend, vanish and reappear.  The artist works in close tones so all is muted, becoming reflective.  Projected architectural images wash over a grid of discrete delicate silk tapestries, depicting the layering of "built" culture, social change, the passing of time.  In the dark, these passages have an afterglow, the gift of phosphoresce, by opposition an internal source of light emission. Different grid systems replace each other, but never completely, a metaphor for colonialism and its aftermath.

The totality of works constitutes a metaphysical self-portrait of the artist at this point in her life and so contains a kind of paradoxical closure, an acknowledgement of the futility of efforts spent trying to construct a definitive personal history from evidence which ultimately now exists only in memory, her own and shared with family, or triggered selectively  from random combinations of "data", selected frozen photographic moments, or serendipitously encountered objects, not necessarily even from that actual personal past.  Unable to return often to her homeland, Carrier experienced more keenly the successive physical ruptures to these sites of her childhood. She documents the action of walking between the sites of these physically vanished homes, in a way which makes it a metaphor for a meditation on impermanence.

There is an aspect of spiritual awareness to this quest, and although I'm wary of such generalizations, Carrier succeeds in realizing an Asian sensibility, a highly abstract expression of her roots which transcends the predictable, possibly clichéed outcomes achieved through either figurative representation or the symbolic grouping of a collection of objects referencing  material culture.  This is the operation of the perceptual realm, of the mind challenging us to understand where matter becomes after-image and then just air.  In the end, one becomes palpably aware of a sense of restrained sadness throughout this exhibition, a feeling heightened by its muted tonalities and its structure as a set of musical movements.

Was this intended, Antoinette, or did it just happen?  I felt the exhibition's musicality operate most potently whilst surrounded
by the work, viewing it, briefly reading the catalogue, allowing thoughts to surface, make their mark consciously, then drop away. When I walked out, I was left not with any particular image imprinted on my mind, nor with anything to ponder or run to ground, but instead with the mood of this show, and a sense of its completeness as a score and my enjoyment of its performance.