Hello I’m Tracey Robb, a Mackay-based textile artist and self-professed sufferer of OCD - Obsessive Crochet
Disorder!
Art and nature have been two of the biggest influences in my life from as far back as I can recall. My early
childhood was spent fishing, building cubby houses and running around carefree with my brothers and
sister on the remote islands of Queensland where my father was a lighthouse keeper. Thus, during my
formative years I learnt to keep myself occupied with what nature provided and the limited supplies that
the fortnightly store boat would bring
When I was 8 years old my family shifted to the mainland and we went to live at the beach where I would
spend most of my spare time beach-combing, even bringing home a WW2 marine bomb one day! My
grandma taught me to crochet during her annual holidays with our family, and this opened a whole new
world of possibilities for me. I loved the tactile nature of yarn and was fascinated by the concept of
producing 2- and 3- dimensional fabrics and objects simply by manipulating yarn with a hook into a
series of interlocking loops. I was such a prolific crocheter during my school years that I remember
unpicking jumpers to reuse the yarn for some of my projects, before I developed my skills enough to sell
the garments I was making. This then provided me with a source of income to spend on more hooks and
yarn.
As a kid I would walk around the streets crocheting, I crocheted a double bedspread on the school bus on
my way to school and back. In high school I crocheted clothing that I sold at a craft shop in town for
pocket money. I spent 7 hours crocheting in the delivery room when I was having my first baby! I have
even crocheted 4.5 meters above the ground dressed in a harness and clipped onto the cage in a
knuckleboom crane while installing the 240 square meter yarn-bomb for All Wrapt Up on Paxtons
Warehouse in Mackay in 2013.
Growing up I constantly looked for ways to make a living from crochet. My most enjoyable attempt was
making crochet bikinis during my late teens, but it still wasn’t enough to provide me with a reasonable
living. So, in my early 20’s I bought a screen-printing business, put down my crochet hook (in a
professional sense) for nine years and took up commercial screen-printing and sewing. I completed a
Certificate in Commercial Art and Design and started designing and manufacturing a range of t-shirts
and resort-wear featuring my own tropical flora and fauna designs.
After the sale of my business in Daintree I moved back to Mackay and returned to producing crochet
clothing and resort-wear in my spare time. During this time, I studied selected courses from an Open
Learning Bachelor of Arts and attended a wonderful mixed-media textile course at McGregor Summer
School at USQ in Toowoomba where I learnt a range of hand and machine sewing techniques that enabled
me to manipulate fabrics and fibres to produce 2- and 3-dimensional works of art. These courses started
me in a new direction which led to the production of non-functional works and the adaptation of a
number of these techniques to suit my crochet practice.
My first solo crochet exhibition "Hooked" in 2013 at the Upstairs Gallery in Paxtons Warehouse, Mackay
included clothing, cushion covers, freeform 3D wired sunbird nests, a freeform crochet bedspread, and
featured my wedding dress. This dress took 18 months to make and consisted of a hemp-silk strapless
dress dyed with mango leaves, overlaid with cotton lace of Irish and Maltese crochet and a bolero
featuring an Irish lace sunbird and passionfruit vine.
The most significant breakthrough in my career as a crochet artist came in 2015 when I collaborated with
2 ceramic artists on a very successful Great Barrier Reef exhibition called Symbiosis. This was my first
serious foray into sculptural, non-functional crochet which gave me an opportunity to experiment with
bifurcation and hyperbolic stitch techniques. I also dabbled with a new idea of crocheting directly onto
wire to support the fluted shapes I was producing. The wire held the shapes much more securely than the
traditional crochet method of starching and blocking the finished works. I also discovered that a
combination of the traditional blocking method worked really well with my new wiring technique. Whilst
working on the corals for Symbiosis and the crochet wall panel The Coral Garden, I developed a fascination
with the mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship between the corals and algae. The algae which contain
the colour that we associate with the corals produce food for the corals through photosynthesis and the
corals provide a protected environment for the algae as well as compounds that the algae need for
photosynthesis.
During this research I discovered that there are other types of algae that form a land-based symbiotic
relationship with specific types of land-based fungi. Interestingly, neither these algae nor the fungi can
live independently of each other and these little “combination-plants” are called lichens – the tiny
insignificant things that grow on rocks and trees as well as many other things around us such as plastic
outdoor chairs and shade-cloth. And very happily for me as an artist, they come in an amazing diversity of
form and colour.
Focusing on land-based lichens was a natural progression for my work as it enabled me to continue
developing earlier techniques. In 2018 I secured a RADF Concept Development Grant which enabled me
to get into some serious experimentation with my 3D wired crochet practice. During this process I
developed the techniques to produce a variety of macro lichens (and a lesson plan for 3D wired crochet
workshops that I delivered in conjunction with my exhibition). The resulting Lichen Garden exhibition
opened on July 30th 2021 at the Foundation Gallery at Artspace Mackay and brought me another step
closer to achieving my goal of supporting myself financially through my arts practice and assisted me in
my quest to demonstrate that fibre arts, and crochet in particular, can be a legitimate and exciting form of
fine art. Having crocheted for over 50 years I feel the need to find challenges to keep my interest piqued and I do
this by experimenting with new stitches, stitch patterns, unusual and unexpected yarns and methods to
create works in 3 dimensional forms. My experiments have led to the development of wire frameworks to
support my crochet as well as crocheting with wire and wrapping wire with fabric strips to give the look
of textile crochet with the support and stability of wire. My experiments with alternative yarns have
included splitting and plaiting natural fibres such as bark, leaves and corn husks, cutting or tearing pliable
objects, such as fabric, plastic bags and newspaper into strips and spinning with drop spindles and
zigzagging into cords with a sewing machine, and the use of combinations of different mediums such as
the fabric and wire combination mentioned previously. I make bespoke tools as supports and frameworks
to crochet onto such as hairpins and drop spindles from CD’s and knitting needles.
In 2020 I was a member of a group of local artists who formed a collective to retail our art through a local shopping centre, which led to a series of public art collaborations and my participation as a lead artist and workshop facilitator in the Plastic Boutique projects in Mackay.
which culminated in large-scale recycled art installations, the most recent Plastic Boutique: Healthy Planet
was hung from the ceiling at Caneland Central shopping centre in Mackay in September 2021, featuring
over 350 birds and 6m x 3m of forest canopy made from preloved clothing and household linen. Over 800
members of the public attended three months of free art workshops where our group of artists taught
sculpture and a variety of textile techniques to produce this installation. This series of projects was in
keeping with my philosophy of minimising my impact on the environment. I love walking on beaches and in the bush and finding interesting natural and found objects, as well as upcycled products discarded by households and industry in my work. I also enjoy finding new and exciting ways of repurposing materials no longer of use or bound for landfill. For Plastic Boutique: Pledge to the Planet in 2019 I used bubble wrap, garbage bags and computer cables to make two wedding dresses as a statement to encourage dialogue about plastic pollution and the
need to repurpose our waste products. I hope that by producing art that gets people thinking and talking about caring for our environment, the need to make conscious choices about the products we purchase and disposing of our waste thoughtfully, that I can make a difference to the preservation of our native flora and fauna.
The process of crochet is very repetitive (5% inspiration and 95% perspiration!) so I find my thoughts helplessly sliding down rabbit holes where I explore new ideas and problem-solve new techniques to bring my ideas to life. Usually by the time I have finished a project I have already come up with a well-developed concept for my next body of work.