The Unsettling Truths of Settling: Ghostscapes in Domestic Textiles

Abstract

This article focuses upon homes and domestic textile traditions as sites where disavowed settler colonial pasts linger. Through art practice, I dwell upon ancestral home-making traditions to investigate my inherited “genealogical ghostscapes” and to acknowledge how ghosting traditions pass along generationally. In specific art works from my 2017 exhibition, Domestic Arts, I scrutinize domestic matter to reveal how since 1838 family members have recalibrated regions of South Australia with imported rhythms and patterns of home-based labor, including making and maintaining comforting textiles. These familiar materialities become the conduit to recognizing the unsettling truths of settling. Overall, it is the use of time-consuming and repetitive methods, similar to those worked by ancestors on their home-fronts, that has become a means of conjuring an embodied way of understanding my settler colonial ancestry. The transfiguring of settler colonial textile traditions into works of art becomes a collective form of protest that invokes an unsettling strategy of recognition. This truth-telling is directed towards not only the under-scrutinized home-making labors of women, but also the ongoing legacies of whiteness and privilege that continue to deny pasts and continue to have repercussions in Australia today.

Keywords:

• settler colonization
• domestic
• ghostscapes
• textiles
• blackwork
• repetitive crafting
• recognition
• truth-telling

Acknowledgements

This article has been developed from postgraduate research and I acknowledge the generous funding of the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship, as well as the University of South Australia for financially facilitating the privilege of full-time study. I am also grateful to the Helpmann Academy who awarded me the Hill Smith Gallery/University of South Australia Postgraduate Prize, which financially gave me the opportunity to present this paper at the Textile and Place conference at the Manchester School of Art in April 2018. I especially wish to thank my supportive and encouraging supervisors, Kay Lawrence and co-supervisor Kathleen Connellan. I also acknowledge that the land I live and work upon is the traditional land of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide region, and this research also investigates the country of the Bunganditj people, in the southeast of South Australia. I respect their spiritual relationship with country, acknowledge them as traditional custodians, and recognize that their cultural and heritage beliefs remain important to the living Kaurna and Bunganditj people today.

Notes

Notes

1 This archaeological discovery, the artifacts of which I was able to handle through the South Australian Museum, led to the paired artwork Beloved I & II (Her and Him). These works use textile scraps like those unearthed—hessian, string, lace—to conjure the ghosts of Mary and her husband George. These artworks can be viewed on the artist’s website: www.serawaters.com.au

2 To “re-member” is a method developed in my postgraduate research, and is pertinent to working with traditions in contemporary art. I developed this method from John Dewey’s proposition of “reconstruction,” which in general terms is motivated by re-working the elements of a problematic situation to re-direct them toward amelioration (Koompan 2013). “Re-membering” has also been developed in response to Dewey’s call for interdisciplinary and critical forms of reconstruction to have real-world impacts (Kumar 2009, 126–127). Rather than being directed at resolutions, my practice-based re-membering cajoles the materialities of traditions into newly directed configurations, offering possibilities for renewed and alternative understandings.

3 My great-great-grandmother was a member of the Robe Mothers’ Union, in 1912, a conservative Anglican women’s group that undertook charitable work and social and cultural reform directed to women and children through “training,” prayer, and “lead[ing] their families in purity and holiness in life” (Carey 2004). The Mothers’ Union fits within a type of maternal feminism which arose in the first half of the 20th century, and whose campaigns, as Swain, Grimshaw, and Warne observe, were “grounded in a mostly disguised racial discourse” (2009, xxii). While feminists of this era did advocate for Aboriginal women as well as non-European migrant women, just as often this was not the case.

4 According to Australian historian Fiona Paisley, “feminist histories of the interwar years in Australia have tended to underestimate settler colonial Australia’s preoccupations with whiteness … and they have given primacy to gender in their analysis as though it were neutral in relation to ‘race’” (2000, 145).

5 Decoration, though, as Alfred Gell clarifies, is “often essential to the psychological functionality of artefacts, which cannot be dissociated from the other types of functionality they possess, notably their practical, or social functionality.” He calls this the “technology of enchantment” (Gell 1998, 74). Elizabeth Wayland Barber reminds us that “ethnographic parallels worldwide show that enormous time is often put into ‘simply’ decorating people and things with efficacious symbols believed to promote life, prosperity, and safety” (Barber 1994, 94).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sera Waters

Sera Waters is a South Australia based artist, writer, and lecturer, with a PhD in visual arts from the University of South Australia. Since 2009, she has lectured and supervised visual art students at Adelaide Central School of Art. In 2006, she was awarded a Ruth Tuck Scholarship to study hand embroidery at the Royal School of Needlework, United Kingdom. Since that time she has specialized in textiles, specifically blackwork, and a darkly stitched meticulousness. Waters exhibits across Australia, as well as internationally, and is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery. [email protected]