Sera Waters

In Falling: Line by Line, Sera Waters has transformed an intimately scaled long-stitch into a seven-metre length of photographic wallpaper. The installation depicts a fallen tree set before a setting sun, referencing the radical shifts that have occurred to Australia’s ecology and the continuance of the colonisation of Country.

Since the 1980s, Australian woolen long-stitches have been commonly associated with amateur kits depicting kitsch and nostalgic pastoral landscapes. Waters’ needlework repurposes the same pastel threads and techniques of these kits to rework these loaded traditions into recognition-based trajectories. Waters stitches complex linear patterns to speak back to the multi-generational repeated habits of misuse associated with the colonised Australian landscape.

Waters is a South Australian textile artist whose practice has been characterised by a darkly stitched meticulousness. Her embroideries and handcrafted sculptures dwell within the gaps of Australian colonial settler histories, mostly to examine the many home-making practices of women and her own genealogical ghostscapes.