SERA WATERS: DOMESTIC ARTS

Sera Waters

11 September - 31 October 2021
Main Gallery

This exhibition subverts and unravels the baggage-laden yet wondrous category of making once labelled ‘domestic arts’ (often a.k.a. ‘women’s work’). Perceived regularly as mundane or sentimental, home-making expressions are reworked in Domestic Arts to show not only the knotty tangles hiding within otherwise innocuous home-craft, but also that these make-do methods are rich repositories of passed along knowledge. In Australia, the domestic arts have been central to settler colonial home-making.

Domestic Arts presents a re-creation of a home; one that celebrates and critiques the tradition of women world-making using the material stuff around them, and one that questions the ongoing and problematic traditions of colonial settling. Using embroidery and home-craft methods, Domestic Arts leaps across generations of local and national historical happenings to create contemporary portals onto the past’s legacies, ever present today.

ADDITIONAL EVENTS:

OPENING NIGHT
Friday 10 September, 6:00pm
RSVP essential

WORKSHOP
Blackwork Embroidery
Saturday 11 September, 10:30am – 12:30pm

Image: Sera Waters, Basking, 2016-17, linen, cotton, sequins, tablecloth, handmade glow-in-the-dark beads, 92 x 60 cm. Photograph Grant Hancock.

Sera Waters: Domestic Arts is a Country Arts SA touring exhibition presented in partnership with ACE Open.
Country Arts SA is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.