Reflective Perspective transform threads to art

Buttons as material for art is something different. All art involves a transformation. It takes ordinary things - clay, paint, wood, metal, ink or buttons or nails - and adds a spiritual quality beyond simple usefulness or even pleasant decoration. This extra magical quality helps define the border between art and craft.

Such distinctions are crucial when confronted with the complexities of an exhibition such as Reflective Perspective by Helen Schamroth, at NorthArt in Northcote until April 17.

Schamroth is highly respected as a creator, writer and administrator in the craft world. The exhibition was opened by Prime Minister Helen Clark.

The show, which is a survey but includes new work, involves sewing and embroidery at the highest level of skill.

Schamroth's materials are not only thread, fabric and beads but buttons, wire, springs, glass and even nails. She uses her highly polished skills to make these varied materials into inventive and charmingly decorative works.

Lively rhythmic patterns of stitching do an elegant dance across black surfaces in work such as Threadspin, although by their nature and scale do not have the emotional impact of a large abstract colour field.

Then there are buttons combined with lacquered copper wire. They make glittering images with interesting texture, although the connotations of buttons - shirts and blouses - tend to trivialise the effect.

There is a feeling that for all the fine making involved, the possibilities of exploring what is buttoned-up and closed and what is unbuttoned and revealed are not exploited. The pieces are attractive but thin as metaphor, which is the life of art.

The pieces reach their peak in a work such as Cape, which involves invention and unusual materials to make a fine decorative hanging.

Schamroth has a fine way with words and one of the most moving things in the show is the autobiographical Old World, New Story.

There is a complete change when Schamroth's sense of history and passionate identification with tragedy intersect with sewing and embroidery, and where a work such as Life Threads moves into art.

The delicate skeining of threads that form an adornment, the overlaid patches of colour, the beading that gives new life to a broken shell and the intricate overlaying of knitted wire take on a special magic.

The outstanding work in the show is Honouring the Memory, a a group of prayer shawls in silk. They hang, somehow dainty and feminine yet empty, scorched and patched. There is more than a hint of shroud about them, certainly an air of death and departure.

They are all stitched and it is clear that once they would have been embroidered with the most careful of smocking, but that here it is improvised, irregular and cut short. Loose ends hang like a flow of tears.

The reference is to young Polish women lost in the Holocaust, but it works memorably as a memory to any young, graceful people who died in violence.

The elegiac tone extends a group of needlepoint embroideries that subtly evoke 18 aspects of persecution. The tight confining frames are appropriate to a memorial but they do not allow the personalities to emerge in the way they do in the more lively Domestic Honours.

The central panel of the elegy All that Remained is very moving, with its overlapping hearts and long trails of thread. When precision gives way to the rips and tears and untidiness of grief, Schamroth's work becomes art of the most moving kind.

In Emma McLellan's work at the Lane Gallery until April 22, elements of control and pattern are both virtues and limitations. Again the starting point is commonplace - wallpaper and fabric design.

The paintings are made by silk-screening elaborate heraldic patterns on to a painted background and then dragging thin colour over the surface. The repeated patterns are symmetrical and use animals and birds among stylised plants.

At the beginning of her career McLellan was a print-maker and her prints often featured sharp-toothed predatory animals that hinted at aggressive relationships.

In a similar way, the animals in these patterns look completely innocent until, on close scrutiny, they can be seen as odd hybrids with the long, sharp-beaked heads of birds. Some look more red herring than fish or fowl. There is a menace in what appears to be innocent decoration.

What gives real distinction to these paintings is their remarkably subtle colour, which moves from the ripeness of Hybrid Interior in Raspberry through Dolly's Interior in Royal Blue, which has intensely intricate foliage behind it, to the rich colour combinations of Composite Nature in Moss.

It is a victory for technique over self-imposed limitations.

McLellan shares the show with Natalie Couch, who mixes Indian ink with graphite and paint to convey a dark world of mythology which is at its best when gourds of wisdom descend to be caught in bowls of thought.