Daughter

Kay Lawrence, AM, one of Australia’s foremost textile artists, has for almost four decades produced woven tapestry works, tapestry weaving being a highly labour-intensive and precise technique. In 1988 Lawrence completed two major commissions for the new Parliament House in Canberra.

Lawrence’s works explore a range of themes, including gender, place and community, and this work, titled Daughter, is from a body of work produced by the artist in the 1990s investigating mother– daughter relationships. Deriving from a drawing executed by Lawrence of her daughter Ellie, in the tapestry the image is transformed into a much more general figure, which looms life-size through a background of text.

The text is sourced from the novel Housekeeping by the American novelist Marilynne Robinson and reads:

If my mother was happy that day we did not know why. And if she was sad the next we did not know why. And if she was gone the next we did not know why. It was as if she righted herself continually against some current that never ceased to pull. She swayed continuously like a thing in water, and it was graceful, a slow dance, a sad  and heady dance.