Sera Waters | Artist
Since the 1980s, Australian woolen long stitches have been commonly associated with amateur kits depicting nostalgic pastoral landscapes. The setting sun has been a common trope in these kitsch kits, as well as in early Australian painting, to indicate a romanticisation or melancholia associated with the changing land and its people. This wallpaper, made from a small long-stitch blown up to four metres tall, depicts a limbless tree set before a setting sun, stitched from the same pastels of these kits. The giant of Hollow Melancholia is used as a symbol of our inherited aftermath caused by the damage inflicted upon Australia’s ecology. Complex patterns are stitched into this long stitch to speak back to the multi-generational repeated habits of misuse associated with the continuing colonisation of Country.
Photograph Grant Hancock