Sera Waters: Domestic Arts

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About

This exhibition subverts and unravels the baggage-laden yet wondrous category of making once labelled ‘domestic arts’ (often a.k.a. ‘women’s work’). Perceived regularly as mundane or sentimental, home-making expressions are reworked in Domestic Arts to show not only the knotty tangles hiding within otherwise innocuous home-craft, but also that these make-do methods are rich repositories of passed along knowledge. In Australia, the domestic arts have been central to settler colonial home-making.

Domestic Arts presents a re-creation of a home; one that celebrates and critiques the tradition of women world-making using the material stuff around them, and one that questions the ongoing and problematic traditions of colonial settling. Using embroidery and home-craft methods, Domestic Arts leaps across generations of local and national historical happenings to create contemporary portals onto past legacies, ever present today

Image: Sera Waters, Basking (detail), 2016-17, linen, cotton, sequins, tablecloth, handmade glow-in-the-dark beads, 92 x 60 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery

Sera Waters: Domestic Arts is a Country Arts SA touring exhibition presented in partnership with ACE Open.
Country Arts SA is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

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Transaction fees apply: Online $2.50 – Counter/Phone $3.50

Telling Tales

A Limestone Coast community stitch project with South Australian artists Sera Waters and Jo Fife

What is Telling Tales?
The Limestone Coast, from Mount Gambier to Bordertown, is rich with untold histories, strange happenings and tall tales: what curious tales do you know about this vast region?

Telling Tales is a community stitch project led by artists Jo Fife and Sera Waters. This was an opportunity for anyone with links to this beautiful region to share tales of past happenings, passed along knowledge, family histories, regional species, weather mysteries and events that have come together in this unique artwork now on display as part of the Riddoch Art Gallery collection.

To further celebrate this artwork and share the beautiful heart of the Limestone Coast community with a wider audience, Country Arts SA developed an interactive website.

Visit the Telling Tales website

The Artists
Jo Fife: Born in Penola, South Australia and has lived most of her life in the region. Jo has worked as a professional artist for the past 30 years, exhibiting locally and interstate, taking out awards for textiles and painting. In this time Jo has curated exhibitions, tutored school and adult groups, mentored young emerging artists and disability groups, worked on community art projects, facilitating the Multicultural Art Project and lectured in textiles and printmaking at TAFE SA.

Sera Waters: A South Australian based artist known for creating artworks invested with a darkly stitched meticulousness. In 2018 she completed her PhD which investigated settler colonial home-making patterns and practices and examined her family histories as inherited genealogical ghostscapes. Waters has exhibited across Australia and is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery.

A full biography, exhibition list and more can be found at www.serawaters.com.au

Stay connected
Like the Facebook page @TellingTalesLimestoneCoast and share your Telling Tales journey with us by tagging us or adding the hashtag #tellingtales to your caption

Tag us on Instagram in any #tellingtales posts @jofifeart @serawaters @the_riddoch @walkwaygallery @countryarts_sa

For stitching tips, head to the Walkway Gallery website.

A partnership between Riddoch Art Gallery, City of Mount Gambier, Walkway Gallery, Tatiara District Council. Supported by Country Arts SA and SALA.