Selected from the Cairns Art Gallery Collection, this exhibition presents textiles designed by nine notable Queensland Indigenous artists. Well-known and emerging artists were asked to consider how the imagery of their paintings, linoprints and relief-sculptures might be reconfigured as floor-to-ceiling textile lengths. 

In translating art to fabric, the essential driver was design, with artists adapting a repeat-pattern format to the drape and movement of pure linen. These results were achieved in collaboration with Cairns Art Gallery staff and Cairns-based designer Bobbie Ruben. Digital printing was a helpful tool in enhancing the spectrum of skills the artists brought to the project: fine drawing, loose painting, precision carving and so on. In developing their designs, the nine artists demonstrate their adaptability and inventiveness, with diverse approaches creating bold new directions in textile art.

Scale was also a key consideration in developing each design. The monumentality of Gordon Hookey’s Murri people as Wallaroos drives home an Aboriginal perspective of the world, while Vernon Ah Kee’s brutalities are chillingly large. Ryan Presley similarly uses repeat motifs to underline the recurring effects of oppression in Bedburners.

Cairns-based artists include Naomi Hobson, Heather Koowootha and Brian Robinson, whose designs respectively show family and Country, traditional women’s building materials and agricultural fertility blooming on ancestral lands.

Claudia Moodoonuthi’s Burkunda are body marks, Arthur Roughsey’s Lardil tradition shows Thuwathu, the Rainbow Serpent and finally Teho Ropeyarn’s imagery instructs on the destruction wrought by trickery in a story about two sister birds looking for scrub yam.