Exhibitions

For In Place, held at the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in February 2021, I invited visitors to experience some of the many ways we interact with the landscape: looking at it, immersing ourselves in it, and trying to impose order on it. The paintings, drawings and books in the exhibition respond to the landscapes of the Riverina, where I live and work, and of Central Australia, which I have visited many times.

The paintings in the exhibition do not depict specific scenes but they are all about particular places. I aimed to capture the essence of places that are important to me and something of the feeling of being immersed in them.

In 2020 I was invited to be part of an exciting project sponsored by Eastern Riverina Arts. An artist and a museum from each of the Local Government Areas serviced by ERA were matched up. The artist was asked to choose and respond to an object from their designated museum. I was linked with the Broadway Museum in Junee, the town in which I currently live.

I love small town museums, which record our rural history. And I have long been fascinated by the question of what they include and what they leave out. The ‘Death and Mourning Room’ in the Broadway Museum tells stories of deaths from the past: the local member’s daughter, the heroic soldier, the notable businessman. 

But what of the stories that are missing from the museum? ‘Those we forget’ tells, in fragments, of local deaths we might prefer to forget. They are stories of human failings and pain: a reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

It pleases me a lot that once this work has finished touring it will be given to the Broadway Museum, inserting these forgotten stories into the ‘official’ history of the town.

The Days of Their Lives was part of an ongoing investigation into the role of domestic crafts in women’s lives, extending the work begun in Secrets and Lives. The lives of ordinary rural women are generally overlooked in published histories of Australia. This project used the visual and haptic qualities of textiles to convey an understanding of bush life in the early twentieth century.

Central to the exhibition were six panels collectively titled ‘The Days of Her Life’. Each panel comprised 365 bush-dyed hexagons arranged in strips of seven. Each hexagon was unique, representing the repetition and variation that make up the days of a woman’s life.

Secrets and Lives was an exhibition/installation of textiles, artist’s books, prints and objects held at the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in 2012. Through stitched textiles, artist’s books and ‘cabinets of domestic curiosities’, the exhibition reflected on the lives of women who lived in the Australian bush, the nature of domestic activities and the purposes they serve, and the secrets that lie behind closed doors.

The Rhythm of Our Days was an extension of the previous exhibitions, Secrets and Lives and The Days of Their Lives. The work developed over time to become a meditation on life in the sometimes harsh and unforgiving environment of south-west New South Wales.

The bush dyeing and domestic quilting processes used reference the tension between chaos and control inherent in our interactions with the land. The goal of the exhibition, which was part of the Land Dialogues conference held at Charles Sturt University, was to prompt the viewer to consider the rhythm and span of their days, and reflect on their own relationship and interactions with the land on which they live.