Anney Bounpraseuth
A portmanteau of crap and appliqué with an aesthetic attitude born from Cabramatta’s 1980s Laotian migrant culture (where women like her refugee mother sewed for local fashion labels for as little as 5 cents per garment), Anney Bounpraseuth names her large tapestry works Cr-applique and her Femmage style Cabra-cadabara. Her overpopulated collage of fabrics and kitsch patchworks are sourced from the places of her youth, especially South-West Sydney’s discount fabric and variety stores as well as discarded paintings, donations or Pay-It-Forward Facebook groups. In The Garden of Re-Birth and Celebration (2020) and The Garden of Self-Love (2020) the spectacle of life’s crap is thus cut and then sewn into a secular paradise overcrowded by godless iconography. Overt in depicting the contemporary imagery of female life in South-West Sydney, they are also covert and subvert with transformations: weaving Biblical depictions of the archetypal Eve indentured by (anti)religion in a hypersexualised Eden.
Bounpraseuth is a ‘third culture child’ of Australia who left Jehovah’s Witnesses at age 30 and her work often pays homage to her mother’s “clashing wardrobe and interior decorating style with fake flowers, imitation antiques and mismatched textiles”. She holds a BFA from the College of Fine Arts (UNSW) and has exhibited at private and public galleries across Sydney, including the University of Western Sydney, Fairfield City Museum, Bankstown Arts Centre and Casula Powerhouse.
Selected exhibition:
2019 – “You Are With Me In Paradise”, Bankstown Arts Centre, Sydney
2017 – “Cabracadabra”, Fairfield City Museum and Art Gallery, Sydney
