Future Traditions: Patterns (Install)

Patterns

Patterns are often overlooked or dismissed as 'decorative'. Patterns, however, carry age-old ancestral knowledge across time, families, culture and borders. Patterns are reproduced from generation to generation - in motifs and symbols, as well as in habits, rituals and more. Intergenerational patterns support and sustain systems of organising and understanding one's world and they often recorded important foods, species, weather patterns, sites and so on.

It is particularly important to examine patterns in Australia, given the transmission of 'normalised' colonising behaviours and models of home-making over the last two hundred years; these ways of doing are often ill-fitted to unceded Aboriginal Country. Colonising patterns are reproduced across daily life, including in textiles, where they are embedded in domestic fabrics, homecraft kits, embroidered motifs, gridded patterns and more. In unravelling such patterns I aim to examine and unpick their legacies.