Exhibition: Garden of Loss and Triumph
My artwork Garden of Tears will be on display at the No Vacancy Gallery, 34-40 Bell Lane (off Russell St), Melbourne from 8 – 14 November 2021.
It is part of the exhibition ‘Garden of Loss and Triumph’. For this exhibition, artists were provided with an A4-sized piece of linen/cotton fabric reclaimed from vintage tablecloths and remnants. The linen was to be used as the foundation for an artwork that is an expression of the challenges, loss and grief we currently face in our everyday lives and also the triumphs, large and small that we create and experience along the way.
For my artwork, I created tear shaped holes in the provided linen. The edges of these holes were hand stitched using cotton thread from my grandmother’s work basket. The holes were then individually filled with seaweed (marine macroalgae) pulp, and the artwork dried and pressed.
Garden of Tears alludes to the tears shed by mothers whose sons and daughters have been lost at sea. The seaweeds used to create the different pulps were gathered from around Tasmania’s rocky coastline, where there have been numerous shipping tragedies over the years.
The linen and hand stitching represent the home and a mother’s love, devotion and selfless domestic labour.
Before it finds its way into personal possession, linen’s value emerges from being laborious to manufacture, a process, which makes its natural fibres forever strong and absorbent. Following this birth, it’s ongoing presence is linked to the home: reminiscent of a mother’s linen cupboard, a grandmother’s linen chest, time and time again, lining the family’s beds, bathrooms, tables and windows.
Passed down through generations, the durable material traverses and embodies the memory of familial experience and emotion. Grief, trauma, loss, but also resilience, regrowth and triumph are profoundly personal, whilst communal in the universality of human experience.(Words by Tahney Fosdike)