Cloaking Quilting Reckoning: We Enslaved Children. 2022-2023. 180 x 186 cm. Textile and wood Dowling. Artist: Linda Knight.

Cloaking, Quilting, Reckoning explores the possibility of a reparative practice through sustained, critical hand-stitching. Across three eventual works, We Stole Wages embraces hours of daily stitching practice for a period of a year in an attempt to provoke meaningful commitment to critically reflecting on non-indigenous Australian women’s complicity in Australia’s colonial history.

The works centralise the role of colonial whites in the implementation of indentured labour programs as part of the notorious Australian Stolen Generations. The personal accounts of forced indentured labour of young Aboriginal girls, such as those endured by Lesley Williams (Williams & Williams, 2015), provoke the explorations with stitching and its associations with domestic arts practised by colonial women living rurally, and how these seemingly neutral or gentle hobbies enact colonial processes of erasure of cultural practices of care.

The works in Cloaking, Quilting, Reckoning physically and figuratively deconstruct domestic homewares textiles produced during the twentieth century that were commonly purchased as souvenir items, that often appropriated Aboriginal art and cultural objects, and reinscribed Country through the eyes of the white tourist. This presentation discusses how the slow, extended labour in We Stole Wages is a transversal process for acknowledging white colonial responsibility, and that the quilt-like object directly addresses us and our complicity.

Talks

Presented as part of the Embodied Material Transformations panel, AAANZ22.live.

Exhibitions

1/2023 – 7/2024. Cloaking, Quilting, Reckoning. International Art Textile Biennale 2023. Juried selection. With Jacobo Alonzo, Laura Bishop, Eszter Bornemisza, Kerstin Bruchhauser, Evangeline Cachinero, Sue Cunningham, Robyn Cuthbertson, Margaret Djarbalarbal Malibirr, Tina Fox, Ann Goddard, Rachael Howard, Josephine Jakobi, Amy Jones, Walter Jugadai, Gintare Joudele, June Lee, Brenda Livermore, Irene Manion, Claudia Mazzotta, Jem Olsen, Sayaka Ono, Rachel Pearcey, Hilary Peterson, Catriona Pollard, Neda Puri Dhir, Tamara Russell, Katharina Sommer, Samantha Tannous, Renee Tovarelli, Ruth Wagner, Rachael Wellisch, Louise Wells, Ji Seon Yoon, Stefanie Zito. Touring East Gippsland Art Gallery, Emu Park Art Gallery, Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery, Roxy Gallery, Moonah Art Centre, Australian Design Centre, Geelong Art Space, and Fabrik, Australia.

3/2023. Wear Out Fashion. With D & K (Ricarda Bigolin & Chantal Kirby). Centre for Rare Arts and Forgotten Trades, Ballarat, Australia.