Mona Hessing was an Australian fibre artist and weaver. She was also known as Mona Johnston. Hessing has been described as having made a 'very significant contribution from the late 1960s into the 1980s to the development of weaving as monumental public sculpture'.
Early life
Hessing was born at Kurri Kurri near Cessnock, NSW and studied design at the National Art School in Sydney from 1951–1956. She worked as a design consultant from 1953 to 1965. By 1962 she started to identify as a fibre artist. She lived in India during 1967–68, designing and weaving a large tapestry in New Delhi, a commission that extended her technical and design vocabulary and gave her experience in large-scale textile work. Hessing attributed her use of materials and 'off-loom" techniques to her time in India.
Art career
Her subsequent work in Australia placed her in the forefront of innovative textile practice, particularly in the area of interior design and architectural work. She did not feel constrained by her use of materials and incorporated silk, jute, sisal, wool and synthetic fibres. She said in 1972: "The concept of a non-rigid, yielding, flexible form that grows and develops at each touch is tremendously exciting. It includes a subtle relationship of things within things and the final form that contains within itself countless co-ordinated events". Using a vivid colour palette, inspired by her experience with Indian textiles, she combined flat and textured knotted weaves in large tapestries that complemented the bold geometry and texture of Australian public architecture of the 1970s. Her smaller works were in perfect harmony with the revolution in domestic architecture of the period, particularly those designed in the romantic and open style of the Sydney school. By the late 1960s she was at the peak of her career as a fibre artist. Described as softly spoken and modest, Hessing cut a striking figure at her exhibition openings, looking "more like a model than a waver of wall hangings". In 1973 she exhibited with ceramicist Marea Gazzard at the National Gallery of Victoria. The same year she was awarded a Churchill Fellowship. In 1990 she moved to Tuross Head on the NSW South Coast to care for her mother, where she remained permanently. She began working and exhibiting more seriously again, showing the results at the Hidden Valley Gallery, Bodalla, at the Priory, Bingie, and in late 2000 at the Canberra Museum and Gallery. Hessing was instrumental in moving weaving from the constraints of fine cloth made on a loom to the freedom, scope and scale of constructing three-dimensional hand-woven forms in a range of weaving and knotting techniques.
After travelling and exhibiting overseas, Hessing settled in Tuross Head, NSW where she continued to exhibit locally and nationally. Her work continues to inspire fibre artists and in 2020 was the focus of Shimmering, an exhibition by a selection of artists from the Eurobodalla Fibre and Textile Artist Group at the Basil Sellers Art Centre, Moruya, NSW.
