The Foreign Within

It’s been eight years since my first residency in Finland — I still remember the quiet thrill of stepping into the unknown, that spark of curiosity that often marks the beginning of any true inquiry.

'A Stitched Vignette' is a two part series of investigative work that was developed during an art residency in Finland. This work unfolds as a contemplative record of time, place and daily ritual. Each day became an act of quiet attention: a line drawn, a thread stitched, a fragment gathered from passing hours. 

'Time and Place - Rituals' traces these accumulations of presence. Each mark and thread maps the quiet negotiations between body and landscape - gesture and climate, repetition and stillness. memory and immediacy. The paper carries the weight of breadth, silence and shifting light across forest and snow. Thread holds what cannot be spoken - moments of anchoring, of release. Not a record of place alone, but of how a body situates itself within it - ritual becomes a way of knowing, stitching a way of holding, and paper a vessel for what time leaves behind.

Opening 10th October at Wallace gallery, 346 William Street, Northbridge, WA.

Exhibition concludes on 5 Dec. 
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Exhibition except.  Curated by Helen Curtis. 

“This exhibition brings together women artists whose work examines, critiques and explores ideas of estrangement. Through bodies, lands, and languages, their works reveal what is unfamiliar, repressed, or othered within colonial histories, patriarchy, and the self.

Working within a new gothic, their practice produces work that can be both alluring and unsettling, shifting between beauty and discomfort, the grotesque and the intimate. They draw on lived realities and dark themes, navigating conflict to uncover social and personal tensions.

Here, the gothic is not confined to shadowed spaces but brought into the open, revealing shared histories of women and people living in contested lands. Memory, suppression, dreams, and desire emerge in forms that are intimate yet uncanny, unsettling assumptions of belonging and reclaiming ground for what has been silenced.” – curator Helen Curtis