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

Domestic Arts 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 to show the knotty tangles hiding within otherwise innocuous home-craft, and 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.

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.