Gentle Art

Gentle Art
Sue and Peggy Pedley

Since 2015, I have collaborated with my mother, Peggy, in an ongoing exploration of our family's ancestral connections to Lutruwita/Tasmania. Together, we transformed her kitchen into a site of experimentation, dyeing our childhood Tasmanian woollen blankets with native plants collected from the shoreline at Low Head, at the mouth of the kanamaluka/Tamar River.
Seaweed, melaleuca, casuarina and eucalyptus gathered from a place where we spent our childhood holidays became agents of transformation, imprinting the blankets with the colours and histories of the landscape. Originally woven from Tasmanian wool at Waverley Woollen Mills, the blankets are everyday domestic objects that carry layers of memory, family history and industry.
Our family's relationship to Tasmania spans six generations and is intertwined with the island's colonial past through wool production, maritime trade and artistic practice. Peggy's grandfather captained the passenger steamer Coogee, which crossed Bass Strait between Melbourne and Launceston, while the woollen blankets speak to Tasmania's long history of textile production.
The materials themselves embody these entangled histories. Wool and seaweed become traces of colonial economies built upon the dispossession of Aboriginal land. Through the intimate acts of gathering, dyeing and making, the work holds personal inheritance alongside the enduring legacies of colonisation, inviting the textile to become a site where memory, place and history are continually reworked.

Expanded Textiles is a group exhibition investigating contemporary textile and fibre practices beyond conventional boundaries, reflecting the growing intersection of
sustainability, environmental awareness and contemporary textile and bio-textile art.

Articulate Project Space: 497 Parramatta Road, Leichhardt NSW 2040 Friday to Sunday: 11am – 5pm