Margintomargin: Artists from the edges of the world

The exhibition is a creative collaboration of Nordic, African and Australian textile artists that partly took place as a seven day creative arts and cultural exchange between (a) Australian and Torres Strait islander (ATSI) traditional weavers from South and Western Australian Anangu Pitjantjatjara communities of: Yalata Maralinga Inc. (Yalata community), Maralinga Tjarutja (Oak Valley community), Paupiyala Tjarutja Aboriginal Corporation (Tjuntjuntjara Community), (b) textile artists and industrial designers from Lapland in Finland, (c) textile and fashion artists from Namibia, (d) conceptual and textile artists from South Australia.

Artists and makers negotiate and sustain their identities and existences through their practices in spite of the challenges they face. Their narratives reveal how qualities of life and work environments impact on their art practices. Just as art making offers ways to ‘work through’ their particular life challenges, narratives offer ways to make sense of difficult circumstances. This art project will demonstrate how art and narratives function in social realms and suggest that stories play a crucial role in socially sustaining artists and their making practices.

This project is a unique cross-continental collaboration that explores and presents art and making processes of women working in different situations across three continents. These women face similar challenges of isolation and marginality resulting from their geographical situations. The project deals with current topics of narrativity, multiculturalism, identities and how these issues are discussed between the arctic and far south, engaging artists’ work and wider communities with these themes.

This innovative art project offers the participants the opportunity to orchestrate and design the workshop intervention according to their choice and how they envisage the execution of their selected interventions in diverse contextualities. This approach not only stimulates empowerment and a bottom-up approach, but it also allows for a more balanced situation to emerge where all the participants have to cope with the familiar and unfamiliar. In this way new possibilities emerge as the artists have to step into unfamiliar contexts. Taking into account the project’s focus on rendering audible the voices of the participants, this approach will ensure this outcome, while it simultaneously will record, document and contextualise their stories.