🐔✨ Make your own iconic chicken bag with WA artist Emma Buswell at Joondalup Contemporary Art Gallery this May!
This hands-on evening workshop will teach participants the basics of bead weaving using simple handmade looms and recycled materials.
Wednesday 20 May 2026 | 6–8.30pm
Ages 16+ | $22
All materials and light refreshments included.
Don’t miss out: link in bio.
Artwork by Emma Buswell, The Sometimes Luxury Handbag and other Suburban Fables, 2022.
Sharing some snazzy 📸 from @sydenham_international from the Liz + Emma exhibition that opened late last year. Thinking about making work for this show got me through last year if I’m honest. Getting to meet @elizabethpulie and learning more about her work was magic. And working with @consuelo.cav and #brendanvanhek was absolute dream as you’d expect! Love them both dearly x. In the Greek mythologies surrounding Hermes the Greek god of trade and commerce among many other things, there is a tale of how his life began. Born from infidelity to the sky god Zeus and Maia, Mother Earth herself, and birthed hidden and secret in a cave, Hermes began his life with a first trade. Coming across a turtle at the mouth of the cave, he offered to exchange his large cave for the much smaller one the turtle carried on its back. Thinking it a deal the turtle agreed and summarily was stripped of his shell. Naked and exposed, the turtle died, and Hermes wasted no time turning the turtles’ shell into a lyre, and its sinews into strings. I’ve thought about that story a lot while making these works.
These works began with beading, repetitively encrusting labour and time into the surface of cloth to create a cartoonish money bag the likes of which populated animated images or bank robbers and thieves through the 1980s and 90s. It was a work meant for another exhibition, but I didn’t have time to finish it. Spending longer on it gave me time to think about systems. The systems shaping our lives; economic, political, technological, that are accelerating beyond the human hand, all whilst dragging us kicking and screaming towards some kind of technocratic hellscape.
I think about these works collectively as ‘Market Scares’. In these new works, capital becomes a cast of characters. Through knitting, felting, and beadwork; techniques anchored in care, repetition, and slow time; a loose cosmology of contemporary economic anxiety unfolds, where the symbols that shape our daily lives behave like wayward spirits: half-comic, half-ominous, roughly soft and fully entangled with the politics of labour, class, and survival.
An Outfit for Everyday Wear, 2025
wool yarn, knitted tracksuit Monuments are usually made to memorialise the powerful and the dead. Old white men on horses, bedecked in military garb, conquerors of colonial questing, bare breasted women, statuesque, impassive and decorative, brutal and bleak towers, commemorating the dead. As objects in public space, they become markers of history and a way of placing a physical totemic value on the actions of an individual or a wider movement. As an ongoing record, monuments presuppose what will be valued by future societies, cementing systems of value, moral codes, and understandings of “exceptionalism”. An Outfit for Everyday Wear considers what it might mean to monumentalise the living; the worker, the exhausted, the ordinary person carrying the weight of daily life, in what can at the present moment, feel like a Sisyphean effort. The work takes the form of a knitted tracksuit, laid flat and lying in state. Drawing from infamous monuments throughout history, from statues to obelisks, busts and plinths, the work is an attempt to mark the current effort as similarly important. Constructed through meticulous stitching, it transforms a garment of comfort and leisure into an artefact of quiet resistance. For me, knitting becomes both a form of care and a political act, a way to think through exhaustion, productivity, and worth. The work asks what happens when we honour the everyday instead of the exceptional, and whether small acts of making might stand as monuments to persistence and resistance within the machinery of late stage capitalism.
Work is on display as part of Monument curated by the excellent @dionne________ for @bragwa 📸 @greatmindsmediaau
EMMA BUSWELL in ‘Textiles X Art’ ‘Textiles X Art: How textiles are shaping contemporary art’ by Ramona Barry and Beck Jobson
Published by Thames and Hudson Australia, 2025
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Textile art has surged into the spotlight, shedding its long-standing association with domesticity and craft to take centre stage in galleries, biennales and critical discourse. Authors Ramona Barry and Beck Jobson explore this vibrant resurgence, and the way artists across the globe are embracing traditional techniques like weaving, embroidery, quilting and dyeing, while pushing them into bold new territory. Far from decorative or nostalgic, these works speak to urgent contemporary themes: identity, gender, migration and environment.
📍 Emma is a Walyalup (Fremantle) based artist, curator and designer fascinated with systems of government, economies and culture, particularly in relation to constructs of place, identity and community. Her current work takes its inspiration from the matrilineal hand craft and knitting techniques passed down from her grandmother and mother, as well as a contemplative investigation into the nature of kitsch, ephemera and national identities.
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Head to the linktree in our bio to read more and order a copy of the book.
Images: Textiles X Art: How textiles are shaping contemporary art’ by Ramona Barry and Beck Jobson, published by Thames and Hudson Australia, 2025.
@textilesxart
Just one more week to check out Under Fire: Clay from the Western Edge @fremantleartscentre working on this project has been an absolute labour of love. I’ve learnt so much from all of these artists. Working with clay is resiliency in action. There are artist talks 🎤 today from 1:30pm with @catconnerceramics@fig_._2@kathy.allam 📷📸 @rebeccamansell
Emma Buswell's work 'Reflections and Revelations' was recently commissioned and acquired by Curtin University through the John Curtin Gallery.
The work will be on public display as part of the exhibition 'Everyday, Myths and Legends' opening next week.
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Everyday, Myths and Legends
John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University
Opening on Thursday, October 2nd
5:30pm to 7pm
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'Reflections and Revelations' continues Emma Buswell's interest into how mythology, political systems, and class intersect. Drawing from the myth of Narcissus and Echo, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, this work pursues how early examples of moral storytelling, ethics and mythology frame the ways in which our current day political systems and environments have been established, particularly in the western context. Here, ancient archetypes resurface as a tool in understanding our present media and political landscapes, where ego and echo dominate discourse.
In a moment where reflection often becomes narcissistic, and language becomes noise, when the status quo is intent on supporting a media environment that prioritizes “flooding the zone with shit”, this work asks what it means to bear witness. Who gets to speak? Who gets heard? And who, like Echo, lingers on the edges; unheard, watching power consume itself?
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Reflections and Revelations
2025
Wool, cotton and lurex yarn
Courtesy of the artist and AVA, Boorloo/Perth
Thanks to Case Frames.
Full of wit and satire and embracing a kitsch aesthetic, Ramsay Art Prize 2025 People’s Choice winner Emma Buswell’s large tapestries investigate the nature of labour and identity through a distinctly Australian lens.
See them on display in the Ramsay Art Prize until 31 August.
Ramsay Art Prize 2025 finalist Emma Buswell’s large tapestries take inspiration from celebrated ancient stories, with the first exploring the myth of Narcissus and Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. In this work representations of this fable throughout art history have been used to make parallels with current political frictions, fraught social tensions and dense media landscapes.
The second piece illustrates the Arthurian legend of the Lady of Shallot to investigate the complex relationship between artistic production, societal withdrawal and escapist fantasies.
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Cast your vote for the People's Choice prize by scanning the QR code in the exhibition and go in the draw to win an overnight stay at the InterContinental Adelaide. Voting closes at 5pm on 10 August 2025. The People's Choice winner is announced on 15 August 2025.
📸 Saul Steed
Pattern exists in many places here; in the tiled surfaces of buildings, the decorative mosaics found under the overpass walls, and in the scattered garden pavers and terrazzo tiles that line the wide walkways shielding shoppers and workers from the sun.
In the spirit of Making Do, this work developed out of a need to produce images more quickly. Images which can read as stitch, or a planned mosaic, a schematic of some sort. Ideas and photographs were collaged from walks through Taipei and collapsed together as a kind of mind map, an attempt to articulate the jumble of thoughts and feelings I’ve experienced here, moving between communication and understanding, all produced on office stationary.
