Artist Statement
I am fascinated how, over years of use, objects catch and retain information about their lives as personal artefacts. Across time and space, they become palimpsests, rich with information. I apply this thinking to an ancestral lace textile that belonged to my great-great grandmother. Transported from a coastal farm in Korčula, Croatia, nestled on the shores of the Adriatic Sea, to the strange and expansive shores of Fremantle in 1913, enveloped by the Indian Ocean, the lace textile has survived in my family 111 years. A continuous thread across oceans and generations, the lace textile embodies diverse narratives of love and loss, happiness and hardship. The lace textile and the information embedded in its surface are catalysts this series of works. Processes including paper-making, screen-printing, mono-printing, patching, ripping, stitching, dyeing and ironing seek to visualise the tales the arise from an in-depth observation of the lace and the stories it contains.