Home Sweet Home, 2023

Created for Upriver Downriver, Maitland Regional Art Gallery.

Embroidery on linen, vintage lace trim.

The people whom inhabit our house make it home, home is a place in our minds where we keep loved ones alive, home is the body we move through life encompassed in, home is the sweet familiar smell of childhood, the places that make our hearts sing. Sweet is the tenderness and care we pour into the people and places we love, the hours creating, the lessons passed down. We cannot separate the intertwined nature of the fullness of life without the fullness of death. This work is a homage to approaches to materials that are a gift from the past, a recognition of comfort, a labour of love. An amalgamation of past, present and future, of both personal and shared histories.

‘and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy,

and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,

tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.’

An excerpt from When Death Comes by Mary Oliver.