Present Tending by Rebecca Mayo, Kylie Banyard, Sara Lindsay, Ema Shin, Ilka White and Katie West at ANCA Gallery 8–26 March 2023

The six artists in Present Tending share interests in textiles, plant colour, ethics of care, stories and places. Katie West (Yindjibarndi) is based in Noongar Ballardong country, Ilka White and Kylie Banyard (Anglo-Celtic) live on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, Ema Shin (Korean, raised in Japan) and Sara Lindsay (Anglo-Celtic) live in Naarm (Melbourne) and Rebecca Mayo (Anglo-Celtic) lives in Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country. 

Present Tending brings together six artists who work with the materiality and histories of cloth and plant colour. Mayo dyed five metres of cloth for each artist with plants collected from Ngunnawal/Ngambri land. She then posted a length to each artist, with the simple instruction that they use the cloth only in ways useful to their commitments and desires in the home, studio, or elsewhere and to do so without producing unwanted labour.

Cut from the same cloth, the works in Present Tending reveal unaccounted for care-work. During the pandemic many people’s homes were co-opted by employers as people were instructed to work from home. The additional caring responsibilities attached to these new ‘worksites’ affected women and low-income earners most, and were often not accounted for by employers.

For these artists, the textile becomes an object and tool of care, a site of resistance or intermediary between the inevitable tensions and challenges of working from home. The range of approaches explored by the artists is a testament to the creative ways artists managed isolation, home-schooling and ongoing employment and financial pressures. The use of natural fibres, dyed with locally sourced plant colour, assists in connecting the artists, and their subsequent audiences, to place, labour and care.

Kylie Banyard, Touching Silver Princess with a soft pause, 2022, oil and acrylic on mistletoe dyed hemp linen and turmeric dyed canvas, diptych 120 cm x 168 cm. Photo by Tim Gresham. Courtesy of the artist and Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne.