The Unsettling Truths of Settling: Ghostscapes in Domestic Textiles

摘要

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.