Narelle Jubelin first studied Art Education at the Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education in Paddington, Sydney. In 1985, noticing the difficulties young artists has in finding somewhere to exhibit their work she(along with Roger Crawford, Tess Horwitz and Paul Saint)founded the artists’ cooperative, First Draft. This is now the longest continual artist run initiative in Australia, as it continues to transfer responsibilities to successive generations of young artists.
Her meticulous miniature images in petit point soon attracted critical attention and in 1990 she was selected for the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale, curated by Giovanni Carandente. In 1996 she relocated to Madrid, where she lives with the architect, Marcos Corrales Lantero, who has often collaborated with her on display structures.
fabric and installation artist, at Musem of Sydney and Powerhouse. For Jubelin’s Collectors’ Cabinets (MoS) see Ann Stephen, Past Present 1999. For Blue Mountains works, especially Joan Kerr’s The Three Sisters and the meaning of the original photograph by Harry Phillips – which is more about cloud symbolism than the woman/nature construction.
In 2001 the Powerhouse Museum (Ann Stephen) commissioned a new work entitled Legacies in transit as a companion piece to Jubelin’s earlier Legacies of Travel and Trade 1990 in which she explored European perceptions of China through petit-point renditions of four photographs in the Powerhouse Museum taken by the professional photographer Hedda Hammer Morrison, who had worked in China in the 1930s and 1940s (later she came to Australia). The new work rendered three family snaps from the Rosenzweig Shanghai albums in petit-point, framed them in found bone and wood frames and set them amongst a Shanghai version of Monopoly ('Shanghai Millionaire’) in which, for example, prestigious Mayfair is renamed 'The Bund’. The board belonged to Herta Imhof, née Rosenzweig, who in 1939, aged three, escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna with her Jewish family and settled in Shangai China where an open-door immigration policy provided a haven for successive generations of refugees.
After the war the family migrated to Sydney as refugees. Herta later worked as a volunteer at the Powerhouse Museum for seven years. Before her death in 1997 she recorded her family history, which forms the basis of the exhibition. One of Jubelin’s petit-points taken from the Rosenzweig photographic albums is a small family snap of very European-looking family rugged up for winter standing in front of the opulent buildings that lined The Bund. The small exhibition, on display at the Powerhouse from October 2001 until 30 March 2002, was shown in conjunction with a major exhibition at the Jewish Museum, 'Crossroads: Shanghai and the Jews of China’.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1999
- Last updated:
- 2020
