A Tangled Bank

Lorraine Connelly-Northey’s artistic practice is inherently influenced by her Indigenous and Western heritage. Using discarded, rusty materials, such as fencing wire and scrap corrugated iron, Connelly-Northey repurposes them into traditional cultural objects. The materials reference the impact of European settlement, land ownership, farming and industrialisation on Country. Using traditional coil weaving techniques, she juxtaposes the industrial with the organic, weaving a new narrative in the resulting dilly bags and coolamons.

Dr Sera Waters is an Adelaide based artist, arts writer and academic. She embraces the textile crafts of the past to examine both her ancestry and our future. Her works are framed in the Australian settler-colonial personal stories, particularly her own ‘genealogical ghosts capes’ which are woven with a fragile and threatened geological narrative.

Twice-removed Fijian-Indian-Australian artist and curator personally reflects on the relationship of movement and migration. She explores dislocation and seeks to account for memory, erasure, healing and the archive.

Léuli Eshrāghi is a Sāmoan/Persian/Cantonese interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator and researcher working between Australia and Canada. They engage with Indigenous futurities as haunted by ongoing militourist and missionary violences that once erased faʻafafine-faʻatane people from kinship and knowledge structures.

Mehwish Iqbal works across painting, printmaking, textiles, ceramics, sculpture and installation art. Her work is veiled by her personal experiences of the social, cultural and political landscapes in both the country of her birth, Pakistan, and her home Australia.

Jumaadi is a Sydney-based Indonesian artist. Working in mediums ranging from gouache on paper to intricate hand-tooled carving and painting on buffalo hide, he creates narratives that weave between Australia and Indonesia. Jumaadi is an arresting storyteller. His works reflect his dual existence between these neighbouring countries and tell historical, cultural, and political stories. Sprinkled in his works are images of animism and spirituality which offer a dreamlike quality.

Sairi Yoshizawa creates ethereal and breathtaking handwoven installations. Using traditional methods such as Ikat, along with knotting, twisting and weaving, every aspect of her work is intricately detailed. Using foraged matter, such as leaves, roots and herbs, Yoshizawa has organically dyed each fibre. Every aspect of this work is considered, a meditation and an act of love and connection to the natural world.

Her textile artworks depict abstract landscapes of our surroundings and what we unknowingly consume in everyday life, through the process of reconstructing materials and natural dyes. For Yoshizawa, the material becomes a ‘being’ that has absorbed the substances in our environment, and that can represent identity and a sense of belonging.

Yoshizawa’s work reflects her interest in the eternal discovery of colours in local landscapes. Natural dye and kasuri-dyeing techniques reveal unpredictable colours and textures; it is like searching for and recording nuances of colours and patterns in the land. Her works mimic the layers of narratives in the simplistic repetitive yet meditative form.