One of my mum’s favourite complaints about her childhood is being forced to wear scratchy home-made underwear, and as kids we were always reminded about how lucky we were to have shop-bought undies.
‘She let her body sway with the movement of the train’ considers the role of nostalgia in popularising craft-based practises, and the return to the artisanal as a growing (upper) middle class mode of homemaking. Utilising multiple forms of hand-crafting, this exhibition delves into the intersections of class, queerness, rural upbringing, and the construction of white settler femininity in so-called Australia, to critically engage with becoming and being a “good white (country) girl.”
This exhibition takes place on the unceded sovereign lands of the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nations. I pay deep respect to their elders, past, present and emerging, and recognise their ongoing and unbroken connection to land and waters. I acknowledge and pay respect to the Dharawal people, on whose land I was born, and Wiradjuri people, on whose beautiful country I was raised. My maternal grandparents farm is overlooked by Kengal, a Dreaming place and sacred site for Wiradjuri people. This country significantly shaped my childhood, and has informed much of the work in this exhibition. I acknowledge the deep harm and ongoing damage that the settler-colonial project continues to inflict in this country, and recognise that these lands always were, and always will be Aboriginal lands.