Spoken by Mitch Mahoney, artist

The story of the tapestry is really connected to our cultural practices of gifting river reed necklaces to people when they come on to Country. The tapestry really is about bringing that essence of safe passage into the hospital because hospitals are places where generally a lot of people will first come into the world, but it’s also a place where a lot of people leave the world.

Spoken by Maree Clarke, artist

When you see the tapestry, you will be looking at one of our microscopic river reed images where I spent two months at Melbourne University, looking at the river reeds, cut to two hundredths of a millimetre under the microscope, and Mitch and I selected one of the images that we thought would look absolutely incredible as a tapestry. Then Mitch did the beautiful line work over top.

Mitch

All of our line work is really informed by Country. We’re telling the story of the Birrarung and the Maribyrnong River system. The story really talks to our connection as Boon Wurrung people and our continuation of living on that area about those waterways and the way they flow and then that connects into the story of the river reeds and our practices of using river reed necklaces.

Maree

When you’re looking at the river reed under the microscope, with the polariser you can change the colours. The beautiful pinks and yellows are picked up by the proteins in the object and they’re put through a dye bath before it gets onto the glass slide and I had almost originally planned to change the colour to a darker colour, but the tapestry workshop absolutely loved working with yellows and pinks and reds and it was just perfect.

When they were weaving it on the two looms, and they’re working at like 10 centimeters a week, which is crazy, and then the back side of the tapestry was all fluffy and beautiful and the colours were so rich. Normally, they cover the back of a tapestry with black material so we asked if it could stay uncovered because that looked just as beautiful as the front, but in a different way. When we went to do the test hang, I think most people stood you know in the middle of it, looking up into the tapestry. It was just fantastic.

Mitch

With the space you get to experience it from the inside, with all of that interior making, the fluffiness, and that texture, and then you can go upstairs and experience the outside of the tapestry with all of that fine, clean detail— in that you know, more traditional way of seeing a tapestry.

Maree

Art in a hospital, I think really helps people’s mental health. And it’s just something beautiful to look at. It just sort of gives you something else to focus on, then, you know, possibly why you’re there. Just for a little moment.

Spoken by Amy Cornall—Senior Weaver, Australian Tapestry Workshop

Welcome to Country Tapestry is the first tapestry we’ve created that has hung in the round. So it’s three-dimensional, work that you can walk underneath it, you can walk around it, you can see it from a couple of different vantage points. So it was woven at the Australian Tapestry Workshop, which is our beautiful light-filled studio in South Melbourne. It was woven by a team of 12 weavers over a period of 18 months, and it was just a really exciting project.

It’s so large it had to be woven in two pieces because we don’t have a loom that is large enough to weave it in one piece. So it’s constructed in two panels, then it’s not sewn together, but the two edges are butted up against each other and they’re held in place by Velcro. We had to be very precise about where the lines meet up. Mitch has created this beautiful line work. And the design wraps around. But because each piece was being made separately, we had to measure very carefully over that time period to ensure that those beautiful angles and all of those lines were consistent. So early on in the project, we have a lot of interaction with the artists, and they come in for visits and they have a look at our ideas.

So obviously, we’re mostly responding to the artwork and to the information that they’re giving us about the concepts. Some things still have to be resolved. So Mitch’s line work, we had to kind of think of ideas that would work in tapestry, particularly around colour and transparency. So we tried a range of different things. We had ten weavers working on different samples and different ideas. And when we had enough material for them to look at, we invited Mitch and Maree to come back in and we just kind of observed them while they responded to those samples. And from their input and their feedback, we then kind of mutually— we all came to one decision and we proceeded with the beautiful blue lines that we have.

We have a standard range of colours of our Victorian wool and it’s all dyed here on site in South Melbourne by our dye technicians. So we have a standard range of 370 colours. For this specific tapestry, we used 103 colours and we had eight colours dyed specifically for the project. I think it brought us a lot of joy as weavers to make this work and to be able to gaze at this work for such extended periods of time. So I hope that longevity of looking at it and being enthralled by it extends to people who are coming to work every day.