hold you close, 2024

the confidantes are a series of embroidered textile objects presented as photographs. A documentation of twenty-three handkerchiefs that belonged to my father, hand stitched in a patterned grid and backed with dyed cloth.

The backing cloths are remnants from ‘tender cloths’ made during my residency at Tender Funerals in Port Kembla, where I dyed upcycled cloth with funeral flowers donated by families. The exhibited cloths were returned to Tender to use in their mortuary for people who came without family or who died in difficult circumstances, in a final act of care. The tender cloth wrappings have been paired with a handkerchief in a gesture of shared remembering.

Flooded with light and captured in photographs, the three layers are revealed at once - the handkerchief on top, the dyed cloth behind and the internal space where beginnings and ends of threads reside.

Contributing writers: Bianca Willoughby, Dani Young-Lynch, Gillian Warden, Helen Gyger, Helen Idle, Holly Story, Isobel Watt, Jan Idle, Jennifer Macey, Jo Darbyshire, Joanne Linsdell, Lizz Murphy, Louise Kyle, Louise Monte, Michele Elliot, Michele Theunissen, Naomi Ullmann, Priscilla Strachan, Sarah McNamara, Shohini Gupta, Tina O’Connell, Vyvian Wilson.

Photographs: Frances Mocnik