Chaco Kato, Rainy Room (detail)
Image courtesy Dianne Tanzer Gallery

I have a memory of looking out my bedroom window and seeing a silken star. A spider was in mid-production of her latest web. Unaware of her audience, she made a rough spiral around her star from the centre to the outside, and then fleshed it out with a finer net, back and forth, spinning her home, a death trap, a marvel. Through a different window on Gertrude Street in Fitzroy, I witnessed an analogous display. Chaco Kato makes webs too, though in her case with a sewing machine rather than arachnid spinnerets.

Kato’s recent solo show one day, under the window is, at its most basic, an exhibition of drawings, the drawing medium in this instance being free machine embroidery. She uses the machine to sew onto heavy sail cloth, roughly cuts around the images and then hand stitches them onto second-hand bed sheets. The sheets themselves are pinned loosely at their corners onto the gallery walls, rippled by sag, bunched up around the sailcloth appliqué, catching in the breeze as I pass by. Kato presents a menagerie of quirky characters: bug-eyed chickens, giant beetles, valiant woodcutters assailing potato plants, fantastical flora worthy of the Voynich manuscript. The plants and animals seem maybe a little miffed at the presence of blank geometric shapes such as spheres, cubes, cones, chains of circles, but perch on them or grow up around them as best they can.

The essay in the exhibition brochure reveals that Kato has an interest in automatic drawing, children’s drawings, outsider art, doodles, the act of drawing as a means of bypassing the conscious brain. Her whimsical, simple line drawings do bring these idioms to mind. In light of this, it is no surprise that spider webs should feature in this body of work too, given that their composition is sourced directly from the instinct of the spider. Is Kato aping the spider by drawing with fibre rather than a more conventional medium?

In spider’s whisper, three machine-stitched spider webs are tacked onto long lengths of sheer fabric, itself cobwebby in texture. The trick is in the viewing. On the gallery floor at the foot of these three banners is a large round disc of silver metal, on top of which are several cones made of the same heavy cloth as the spider webs above, gridded with stitch. When viewed from above, the cones appear to flatten out to circular shapes with a central point, concentric rings and radii. They become spider webs themselves, only morphed into three dimensions, retractable like telescopes. This was my ‘eureka’ moment, and it helped to shed some light on the puzzling imagery of other works.

rainy room, for example, contains both spider web and cone motifs. It is a typical bed sheet piece, occupying most of which is a large, distorted cube-like shape that must be the room referred to in the title. A spider web is slung in the corner, and large cones and windsock-shapes splay out from other vantage points. In the middle of the room are two tiny figures and a plant, upon whom a scattering of droplets rain down. Maybe the windsocks are spider webs stretched out at their central point, like those in spider’s whisper. Together, the flat spider webs, the cones depicted as line and the cones fabricated as objects, summon the varied dimensions of the world. This trans-dimensional shift is vaguely troubling. I’m starting to think event horizons, twin paradoxes, chaos. The two figures in rainy room seem not to care though, they are more interested in juggling raindrops than existential angst.

In once, there was a flower on a hill, small leafy plant takes centre stage while several large spheres drift past. The spheres remind me of wiremesh shapes in 3D CAD, a peculiar association to make for a body of work which is soft and floaty in texture. The pure Cartesian space of a computer screen has been replaced by a bed sheet, and the mathematically-true lines of the computer-generated shapes are now stitch, rough and slightly droopy. Labouring with CAD is never something I particularly look forward to, it is far too complex and esoteric, so for me it is satisfying to see its purity violated. From wherever the spheres have emerged, whether CAD, the geometrical ponderings Leonardo da Vinci, advanced calculus, whatever, Kato has created an organic filter on an abstract world. (Or an abstract filter on an organic world.) Her process of drawing with machine stitch parallels this union, as the mechanised action of the needle traces a path governed by the motion of human hands and limbs, wonky and gestural.

The softness of the works themselves contrasts starkly with the hardness of the exhibition space in Dianne Tanzer Gallery, with its white-on-white walls, hard corners and concrete floors. It would be easy for their differing spatial sensibilities to jar against one another and kill the experience. But they do not clash, rather they create a complete environment which harks to Kato’s background as an installation artist. The blank spaces of the sheets are themselves suspended in the blank space of the gallery. A void in a void. Those works depicting empty geometric forms add a third level again. Inamongst the floating world of one day, under the window, I find myself to be another quizzical chook puzzling over an empty frame, another doomed bug entangled in a web.

While her drawings seem naïve, the sailcloth frayed, the bed sheets scuffed and stained, Kato’s works have a freshness and grace. They balance a fine line between awkwardness and elegance, beautiful in their imperfection. The otherworldly, hyper-creative subject matter might appear in our dreaming state, or in the memories of fairy stories from our childhood, but Kato brings it into the waking world and to the adult audience of (capital F, capital A) Fine Art. To some, the exhibition is likely to be a little too sugary-sweet. Kato risks being accused of rose-coloured idealism or deliberate infantilisation, even mockery. The other side of this, however, is an opportunity to abandon the seriousness of life for a little while and surrender to small fancies as they unfold. Is it indulgent escapism or a welcome antidote to a cold world? Kato offers her point of view, and whether or not you swallow it is your choice.

Swallow I did. I left the gallery into a slightly transformed world, the walk back to work less that of a body scurrying past the sharp grey monoliths of the city, but rather a mind in transit upon a viewing platform, amidst the raw ingredients of imaginative possibility.