Patterns are often derided or dismissed as “decorative” but patterns carry age-old ancestral knowledge. Patterns are reproduced from generation to generation; in habits, rituals, family traditions, and more. Intergenerational patterns support and sustain systems of organising and understanding one’s world. In Australia this is particularly important to examine given the passing along of “normalised” colonising behaviours and patterns of home-making over the last two hundred years; patterns often ill-fitted to unceded Aboriginal Country. Colonising patterns are reproduced across daily life, including in textiles where they are embedded in domestic fabrics, home-craft kits, embroidered motifs, gridded patterns and more. In unravelling such patterns I aim to notice, examine and unpick them to acknowledge their embedded knowledge. It is also necessary to rethink many patterns, especially those reinforcing settler colonialism, to expose, unravel, restitch and use these renewed patterns to decolonise and shift us into new patterns for a more survivable, caring and ecologically-minded future.

Berlin wool work was imported to Australian shores with settler colonists. This form of counted thread embroidery (not 'tapestry' as it is often mistakenly referred to) uses predominantly wool upon canvas and was mass-produced as kits for wall hangings and soft furnishings. Berlin wool work was highly popular in the nineteenth century and often depicted "patterns" consisting of European flowers. The importation of these non-native patterns is another form of colonisation, emanating out from home interiors.

The patterns within a ‘Geometric Discipline’:

The idea of a ‘geometric discipline’ came from reading Denis Byrne’s chapter "Nervous Landscapes: Race and Space in Australia" (in Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity, edited by Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp 103-28.). Byrne investigates the gridding of our lives; homes, school tables, streets, cupboards with boxes within boxes (rooms), and even coffins, forcing a rather unnatural lived experience of walking straight lines, turning ninety degree corners and adhering to rigid and controlled ways of being. This ‘geometric discipline’ has been a pattern of controlling, containing and stifling behaviours replicated across Australia as colonising; putting in fence lines, building angular houses and walls, gardening and monoculture farming in rows, overwriting pathways for bitumised roads. I have evidence of my ancestors replicating these geometric disciplines again and again: one ancestor was even assistant to George Goyder who became Surveyor-General of South Australia in 1861. These angular boundary keeping tendencies have also been inherited through practices of needlework. Counted thread modes of embroidery such as blackwork, Berlin needlework, cross-stitch or long-stitch work upon grids, follow linear boundaries, and are restrained by a repetitive geometric discipline. Only retrospectively have I come to understand all my embroidering practices are bound to grid-like structures, ordered according to squares, and require the body (and mind) to see the world through limited patterns. This grid could be referred to as a ‘spectral structure’ (Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 51) for often it lurks underneath the layers of labour, but still governs the potential imaginings and physical arrangement of matter on the surface. Rather than move beyond the grid and its requisite geometric discipline my artwork tends to exacerbate these geometric patterned behaviours, often to the point of obsessive diligence. The grid strains to contain the repetitive patterns I stitch again and again to draw attention to their restraints.