COLIN LANCELEY Australian, B. 1938

Colin Lanceley, AO, first came to critical attention in 1962 when he exhibited as one of the Annandale Imitation Realists at the Museum of Modern Art and Design in Melbourne, showing wittily subversive and brightly coloured assemblage-paintings. He has received numerous professional awards over the years, including the Young Contemporaries prize in 1963, the Helena Rubinstein Travelling Scholarship, 1964, the Scottish Arts Council Prize at the Edinburgh Festival, 1967 and an Australia Council creative fellowship in 1991. His work is now represented in the national, most state and many regional public collections.

Since its inception in 1976, Lanceley has produced four unique tapestries with the Victorian Tapestry Workshop (VTW) – the largest and arguably most significant provider of public art in Australia. VTW tapestries are not produced in numbered editions – as are, for example, many tapestries woven for Australian artists at Aubusson in France or Portalegre in Portugal. The Victorian Tapestry Workshop is the only institution of its kind in Australia, and one of the very few in the world, able to undertake the weaving by hand of large-scale tapestries such as this.  Although its techniques date back to fourteenth-century Europe, the Australian workshop is unique in that all its weavers are trained artists themselves and in collaboration with the designing artist bring forth remarkable dimensions of colour, texture and light in the finished work.