Flotsam & Jetsam

Carly Tarkari Dodd
Cheryl Hutchens
Deborah Prior
Jacqueline Bradley
Kay Lawrence
Makeda Duong

‘Flotsam and jetsam’ is an expression used to describe an accumulation of ‘odds and ends’. It also refers to two different kinds of shipwreck. ‘Flotsam’ is the cargo that floats ashore after a shipwreck and ‘jetsam’ is gear discarded to lighten the load in the face of danger. One is unintentional and the other intentional. The distinction between the two is important under maritime law because of ownership; flotsam may be claimed by the original owner, whereas jetsam can become the property of whoever discovers it. The sad reality today is that our oceans and waterways are scattered with debris, most of which is plastic that is incredibly harmful for the environment.

For the past few years Adelaide textile artist Cheryl Hutchens has been hand-punching out sequins fabricated from her household recycling. “Sushi boxes are one of my favourites” the artist admitted during a studio visit, as she lovingly cradled an old shiny black and gold plastic sushi box. Her new work takes her obsession with patterned plastics even further with the insertion of quirky, playful, and poignant details – “no” in red lettering, recycling symbols, dairy cows, an adorable pig with a blue bow. Inspired by the photographic series by Chris Jordan, documenting decomposing albatross chick bodies on the shores of Midway Atoll. As Hutchens described, “who died with their guts full of plastic (albatross parents mistake rubbish for food and collect from ocean and feed to chicks).” Likewise, Bird Guts and Purge sampler I are illustrative of the grotesque internal organs and stomachs littered with plastic. Hutchens’ versions are beaded beauties, somewhat reminiscent of nanna’s embroidered handkies but with loud clashing colours that bombard the senses. Their beauty is a front for the sad and starling reality beneath.

Also working with found, humble, and familiar household items such as tablecloths, blankets and cloth napkins is Deborah Prior and Kay Lawrence. Both artists have gone through a process of mending simple fabrics. Their bodies of works are like sewn up skins that are beginning to heal. Lawrence’s six textiles were made between 2012 and 2016 from found and hand-me-down odds and ends that the artist collected from around the world. Lawrence explained, “handwoven cloth from India and indigo dyed cloth, Japanese Kimono fragments.” She has repaired them all slowly and carefully with running stitch “the simplest of stitches”. Prior has collected all the pieces of a pair of blankets that have been used in various projects and even been scrap material “used to plug holes!” This exhibition has been her motivation to find all the repurposed sections of blanket and slowly and painstakingly put the blankets back together so that (maybe) they can be whole again. But as the artist confessed: “no time or pain or effort can repair things exactly as they were.”

As with many craft-based arts practices they take time and care, are often handheld and handmade, laid in laps, taking over living rooms, studios, kitchen tables and beds. They are lived with and worked on for significant amounts of time and through a labourious process of piecing, stitching, threading, weaving, knitting together these odds and ends become part of something greater. A message, a story. Carly Tarkari Dodd, proud Kaurna/Narungga, and Ngarrindjeri artist based in Adelaide, “mix[ing] traditional and contemporary techniques, to produce works that are conceptually and culturally driven.” Here she combines traditional Aboriginal weaving with European royal portraiture traditions, placing herself within woven frames, adorned in woven raffia crowns. Her regalia and lukewarm expression challenge “onlookers to consider Australia’s history, […] to take ownership of what is the strongest symbol of colonialism: The Crown.” Her frames draw on lived history and injustices experienced by her people. She frames herself as a strong, regal, and Sovereign First Nations Person.

Makeda Duong also makes art that directly references her lived experiences and her identity as a Vietnamese Australian woman. Her work explores experiences of inequality and absurdity while working in customer service roles. She knits real quotes from real customers, highlighting class division and the superiority experienced in a world where the customer is always right. When talking about the Shit Customers Say series the artist said, “I don’t want it to be negative necessarily, I want it to be quite funny.” Through humour she draws the audience member in and takes them on a journey, a day in the life of a customer service worker.

Also beckoning closer examination is Canberra based installation artist Jacqueline Bradley’s Apricot Niche sculpture consisting of a custom-made linen and wooden structure holding eight hundred individual apricot stones. The perfect semi-circle of fabric suspended across flag posts is the ideal viewing platform for private inspection. The stones are not alive nor dead, holding the potential for an entire orchard neatly compartmentalised. Bradley creates order from chaos and organises an immense ecosystem one bite-sized nook at a time. The artist beautifully described:

“Backyard landscapes are intimate moments of control within controlled suburban blocks. In these sites, eating and feeding and growing and rotting unfold in close proximity. This small space is filled with chickens and orchards, eggs and apricots, shells and stones. Things replicate and reproduce, and with each cycle the site is remade.”

Whether remade or repaired, needle-worked, gathered, or woven, found, or reused, these textiles hold memory, time, life, and experience. Each tells a different story, if only we would take the time to listen and look a little closer, we might make a new discovery of our own.

Precious Cargo
Polly Dance

Carly Tarkari Dodd

Carly Tarkari Dodd is a Kaurna\Narungga and Ngarrindjeri artist. She has been mentored by Indigenous Tasmanian artist Max Mansell and was taught traditional weaving by Ngarrindjeri artist Ellen Trevorrow. In 2013 she took part in a cultural camp at Coober Pedy, learning traditional methods of painting.
Within her practice Carly mixes traditional and contemporary techniques, to produce works that are conceptually and culturally driven. In 2018 she was the recipient of the Carclew Emerging Curator Residency. Her works were exhibited during SALA 2018 at Adelaide Town Hall, The Mill in 2019 as part of Tarnanthi (a solo exhibition), ACE in the Survey Artist Exhibition, and in 2021, an exhibition that was a collaboration between Guildhouse and the city of Adelaide.
Carly won the South Australian NAIDOC Young Aboriginal of the Year in 2018. Carly has facilitated art workshops at WOMAD, Spirit Festival, The Art Gallery of South Australia and the Adelaide Fringe. She was also the chosen artist in ‘The Studio’ at The Art Gallery of South Australia for Tarnanthi 2020.
Cheryl Hutchens

Cheryl Hutchens is an Adelaide based textile artist making work inspired by her equal compulsions for the history and material culture of cloth, and the how and why of the living body. She completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at the South Australian School of Art in 1999 and returned to achieve first class Honours in 2013. She has studied dressmaking, travelled a little, and lived in London where her love of history and collections was spawned while working at Tate Britain. Cheryl has exhibited locally and nationally, and her work is included in the University of Adelaide Art Collection. She works from Switchboard Studios, Norwood.
Deborah Prior

Deborah Prior is an early-career artist whose art practice navigates the complexities and pleasures of being and having a body through time-consuming, contemplative craft practices and endurance performance works. Working primarily with salvaged domestic textiles, Prior crafts objects and actions that consider bodily agency, Feminist modes of production, and the personal and social histories of domestic work as a squatter/colonist living on Kaurna Land. Most recently she has been thinking about the body in the landscape, and the deeply anxious state of attempting to live well with an unwell planet.
Prior completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) at Adelaide Central School of Art in 2006, and a PhD at the University of South Australia in 2014. She has exhibited at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, SASA Gallery, Adelaide City Council Art Pod, FELTspace, CACSA’s Project Space, Seedling Art Space, Adelaide Central Gallery, Trocadero Art Space (Melbourne), Rubicon Ari (Melbourne), and Kings Artist Run (Melbourne). She is a past alumni of the Guildhouse Collections Project (SA) and was the 2016 recipient of the Helpmann Academy British School at Rome Residency. In August 2019 she was Artist in Residence at the Australian Tapestry Workshop (Melbourne).
Jacqueline Bradley

Spanning sculpture, performance and photography, Jacqueline Bradley is an artist concerned with the layers of meaning, history and experience that intersect in contemporary relationships with the outdoors. Bradley re-makes figurative elements such as coats, scarves and shoes, and merges them with unrefined, found materials – boulders, fencing and earth. Her work reflects the constant shift in scale experienced in the outdoors, moving between the immense, as in the two-storey ladder dresses commissioned for the National Portrait Gallery in 2017, and the intimate, in works combining combs, thimbles and glasses with grass, rock and branch.
Bradley has exhibited and collaborated with artists and curators in Australia and internationally. Significant exhibitions in climbing equipment at the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, finalist in the National Self- Portrait Prize 2015, and the European touring exhibition Futurotextiles (2012-14). Jacqueline is also a lecturer and has recently completed her PhD at the Australian National University School of Art and Design.
Kay Lawrence

Kay Lawrence AM is one of Australia’s most distinguished textile practitioners. She has an international profile as a tapestry weaver and has completed a number of major commissions for public spaces in Australia and overseas. Her work is held in many public collections and she has made a substantial contribution to the development of craft practice in Australia through her teaching, writing and art making. In 2002 a monograph on her work was published by Telos Press in the UK. Her writing, published in catalogues, scholarly journals and edited books, focuses on the materiality and making practices that underpin contemporary craft. Kay is currently Emeritus Professor in UniSA Creative at the University of South Australia.
Makeda Duong

Makeda Duong graduated from the South Australian School of Art in 2013 with a Bachelor of Visual Arts Specialising in textiles. Following on from her degree, in 2014 she was able to participate in a Helpmann Academy emerging artist’s mentorship with Adelaide artist Sera Waters. Since 2013 she has participated in several group exhibitions, locally and interstate. In her first solo exhibition The Cursed Boyfriend Sweater in 2015, she explored the parallels between craft labour and emotional labour as feminine burdens in contemporary domestic relationships.
In 2020, she undertook a Studio Residency at Nexus Arts as part of the SALA Festival. The residency included an artist mentorship, this time with local artist Cheryl Hutchens. Her current practice attempts to unravel and represent aspects of her lived experience in relation to themes such as race, gender, sexuality, and mental health. Recent themes in her work explore her identity as a Vietnamese Australian woman and the experiences of a mixed race person living in Australia.