Kerri Barrie: wearable art on the world stage

WAFTA members and guests were treated to a fascinating and wide-ranging presentation by Kerri Barrie in March.  Freshly back from being a finalist and winner in the World of Wearable Art Competition 2024 in Aotearoa (NZ), Kerri is a Perth-based artist who blends art, fashion, styling, and sustainability. With a degree in Visual Arts-Fibre Textiles and decades of experience in dress-ups, costume, hairdressing and makeup, she creates wearable collage and sculptures from a diverse range of materials, including metal, fabric, rubber and plastics. Her work often explores notions of sustainability.

Attendees online and in-person were treated to an overview of Kerri's artistic career and development, from her early love of dressing up and creating outrageous costumes, her  motivation behind doll making, through to teaching fibre and textile techniques and skills in Bali, enabling local community members to develop their own small businesses.  She talked about a number of wearable art creations that she has made over her career, her creative process, from ideation, through to engineering a piece, and spoke of problem-solving when working with different materials in terms of weight, flexibility, aesthetic possibilities and limitations of the materials that she worked with.

Her many samples and materials allowed us to see the technical skills and finish she has been able to achieve with a variety of unconventional materials, treating each with respect, care and attention. We would like to thank Kerri for sharing the behind the scenes of her practice in such an inspiring presentation!