Renowned artists Maree Clarke (Yorta Yorta/Wamba Wamba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung) and Mitch Mahoney (Boonwurrung/Barkindji) will collaborate on the design for the monumental tapestry 'Welcome to Country - now you see me: seeing the invisible', incorporating microscopic images of river reeds from the Maribyrnong River and skeletal drawings of local native flora and fauna.

Working closely with master weavers from the Australian Tapestry Workshop, Clarke and Mahoney’s artwork will be transformed into a three-dimensional tapestry spanning 4.2 x 10 metres, making it one of the largest tapestries ever produced for a public hospital in Victoria.

'Welcome to Country – now you see me: seeing the invisible' will be woven by a team of weavers including Chris Cochius, Amy Cornall, Leonie Bessant, Saffron Gordon, Tim Gresham, Pamela Joyce, David Pearce and Emma Sulzer over 12 months.

Plenary Health New Footscray Hospital Project Chair, Kelvyn Lavelle, said “Mitch and Maree will design a tapestry that will greet the public and staff with a striking visual connection to the local landscape.”

“The integration of art into the hospital's design serves not only to complement the architectural aspects but also to foster calmness and cultural safety in a hospital environment that can often be stressful for patients and family.”

The tapestry is a collaboration between Plenary Health, the official arts partner for the new hospital, Footscray Community Arts, the Australian Tapestry Workshop, and the Tapestry Foundation of Australia, in collaboration with the Victorian Health Building Authority and Western Health.

Footscray Community Arts Artistic Director, Daniel Santangeli said, “Art at the new Footscray Hospital will reflect Footscray’s rich history and strong sense of community.

“As Footscray Community Arts celebrates 50 years of creativity in Melbourne’s west in 2024, we’re proud to be working on this significant tapestry with two renowned artists who have a strong history of practicing in the area.”

Public art is a core part of the new Footscray Hospital’s overall design approach to help deliver an improvement in health and wellness and include various standalone works and immersive art forms in external and internal spaces of the hospital.

Director/CEO of the Australian Tapestry Workshop, Sophie Travers said, “This is a wonderful opportunity for the weavers of the tapestry workshop to collaborate with leading artists and communities in Melbourne’s west.

“The tapestries we have woven for hospitals are amongst our most loved, because of the colour, warmth, and connection they bring to people of all backgrounds. We are confident this will be a joyful and much-loved addition to a beautiful new building.”

The new Footscray Hospital tapestry is generously supported through the Tapestry Foundation of Australia and State Government of Victoria as part of The Premier’s Suite partnership to fund tapestries in new Victorian hospitals.

Construction is well underway on the $1.5 billion new Footscray Hospital that is set to open in 2025.

The new Footscray Hospital tapestry is the second major tapestry that forms The Premiers Suite, a partnership between the Tapestry Foundation of Australia the State Government of Victoria and the Australian Hotels Association to fund the production of major tapestries in new hospitals in the State. The first of The Premier Suite collaboration is The Declaration of the Rights of the Child designed by Emily Floyd and woven by the Australian Tapestry Workshop on display in the Foyer of the Joan Kirner Women’s and Children’s Hospital.

The tapestry will take a team of 10 weavers around 12 months to create. The weaving team will draw from the ATW’s extensive palette of over 360 coloured yarns sourced from Victorian farms and dyed on site in South Melbourne.

We were thrilled to work with artists Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings on ‘Old Media,’ a magnificent large-scale tapestry commissioned for a private collection in the United Kingdom. ⁠

Biggs and Collings' responded to a colour palette specified by Paris architect Luis Laplace.

“Colour is important to us. We tried to choose colour that seemed translucent – an illusion of dancing light – a bit like celluloid colour to remind you of the flickering colour you see on film. The apparent transparency of the motifs (the main shapes) is offset by opaque field colours: the blues and greys. It aims to feel uplifting, a bit like a sunset, or a dawn."

"Our paintings usually have a triangle and half-triangle motif, we use it as a vehicle for a rigorously non-figurative experiment with colour and tone. It doesn’t carry meaning. It is just a shape. We felt compelled to change it here because of the place the tapestry is going to be in. The half circles we’ve used, relate to our usual half triangles, but in a vague sort of way they are also connected, in our minds, to the auditorium context. They’re semi-CD. Semi planet. Half-moons. Semi reels of film. Semi spools.” – Emma Biggs & Matthew Collings

Biggs & Collings begun their collaborative practice in 2001 and are internationally renowned for their works in mosaic and abstract, oil-on-canvas paintings informed by art of the past. While they believe art as it used to be understood has come to an end, old ideas and habits remain and inevitably influence the artists of today. The issue of how the past is present in what we, as a society, see and do, and the way in which it may differ from what we believe we say and do, is at the heart of Biggs’ and Collings’ work.

Led by Tim Gresham our eleven weavers translated this design into tapestry, completed in July 2023.

Tim said “Emma and Matthew gave us such a beautiful design to work with. Our focus is on the luminous and translucent quality of the colours. The intense colours and blends where the brush strokes meet are played up in the tapestry, which is scaled up 20 times in size from the design. This increase in size allows for a great deal of creative input from the weaving team, and they are doing an amazing job.”

Spanning two looms the exceptionally large 'Parramatta' tapestry designed by Chris Kenyon has been commissioned as one of many new public artworks destined for the entrances of the new Parramatta Square building in Greater Western Sydney, built by Walker Corporation.

Kenyon is a New South Wales-based, impressionist landscape artist. He uses various painting media to depict nature and landscapes and extracts and dissects strong linear forms. Kenyon is also creating a sculpture of the 'Rose Hill Packet' for the main entrance in Parramatta Square. The 'Rose Hill Packet' was the first ship built by Europeans, designed to carry provisions up the Parramatta River from the fledging settlement of Sydney Cove. In creating his tapestry design, which will welcome visitors to the eastern entrance of the building, Kenyon painted what he imagined to be the viewpoint from the water — as if aboard the vessel — to the river shoreline.

Kenyon researched written descriptions of the region and the earliest sketches and watercolour paintings, done by various artists at the time, including George Raper. Raper, an officer on the first fleet, was an enthusiastic watercolourist, producing around 400 sketches and watercolours of the area. Kenyon writes: The realisation that this was a rich, luxuriantly wooded area made me determined to represent this lushness. I wished to create an atmosphere of golden freshness, with a luminous light reflecting the pure quality of the water, with the Blue Mountains in the background. The level, relatively flat landscape allowed light to penetrate, and so, this feeling of openness was also something I intended to capture.

Kenyon wanted to depict the mystery of the Blue Mountains and the possibility they held to early colonists as a subtle backdrop to the main elements of the landscape. The colonists would have seen the Blue Mountains as a barrier, although the Burramattagal people, the traditional owners of this Country, had traversed them for millennia.

'Parramatta' is the second-largest tapestry woven at the ATW after the Parliament House tapestry designed by Arthur Boyd AC OBE. The tapestry was constructed in two parts as its width is wider than the ATW’s broadest loom. One section is 6.3m wide using 1260 warp threads, and the other is 5.2m using 1040 warp threads. The two parts were joined during installation in Parramatta Square. Due to the four-metre viewing distance the tapestry is woven with a very course warp setting, using two warps per cm and 12 threads on the bobbin. Kenyon’s tapestry design was scaled up ten times, resulting in a 1cm area on the painting becoming a 10cm area on the tapestry. This level of upscaling results in a high level of abstraction of the design, with the capacity for creative interpretation.

Led by Chris Cochius and Pamela Joyce, a thirteen-person weaving team worked collaboratively on this project, with Cochius and Joyce maintaining consistency across the two looms, creating, as they gradually proceed, the strong shapes and high contrast of the landscape. Kenyon encouraged the weaving team to employ their expert knowledge and skills to realise his painting in tapestry form. He was keen for the black lines around the boulders and trees to soften, and the colours warmed up — and he and the weavers discussed creating a sense of depth between the foreground and mountains by making the tones graduate from light at the bottom to dark towards the top of the tapestry.

Commenced in May 2021, the tapestry took 18 months to complete and weighs over 200kgs.

In 2017 a major new tapestry, Morning Star was commissioned for the new Sir John Monash Centre (SJMC) in Villers-Bretonneux, France. Morning Star was designed by prominent Australian artists Lyndell Brown and Charles Green.

The tapestry was generously supported by the Tapestry Foundation of Australia, Australian Hotels Association, ANZAC Centenary Arts and Culture Fund, Marjorie M. Kingston Charitable Trust, Calvert-Jones Family, Anne and Mark Robertson OAM, Baillieu Myer AC and Sarah Myer, Yulgilbar Foundation, Chasam Foundation and the Myer Foundation.

The SJMC was designed by Cox Architects and Convergence Associates to create an evocative, emotional, informative and educational experience for visitors. The Centre will provide a lasting legacy in perpetuity commemorating the 46,000 Australian lives lost in the battles of the Western Front in World War 1 and will commemorate the Centenary of ANZAC.

Of the tapestries lasting contribution and symbolism, Brown and Green noted:

“Just as the SJMC provides both Australian and non-Australian visitors with an understanding of the impact of Australia’s involvement on the Western Front through an engagement with the places in which the Australians fought and the experiences of those who were there, so this tapestry aims to communicate to non-Australians and to Australian pilgrims an understanding of the places for which the Australians fought and the imaginary spaces that they carried with them.

The tapestry seeks to evoke the experience of arrival at a war, and in particular of Australians at the Western Front. With them on their arrival were their memories of Australia and their departure from home. These are the subjects of the tapestry. This tapestry aims to evoke the soldiers’ pathway from home to the Front, and emphasizes the incongruity between the Australia that they imagined as they journeyed further towards the Front. It seems to us that it is absolutely essential, first, to evoke a mental place of Australian freedom and clear light; and, second, to evoke the sea-borne passage towards the soldiers’ arrival at the Front. The tapestry emphasises the disjunction between the terrible experiences that the museum describes rather than repeats them.

There are two personal contexts that we offer to illuminate our work. Charles Green’s grandfather served as an Australian soldier on the Western Front. He was gassed and lived the rest of his life as an invalid, as a deeply disturbed shadow. Although he died decades before Green was born, that WW1 tragedy was very present in his family and especially with his grandmother, by then a war widow. And interestingly, she spoke often about the soldiers’ love of Sir John Monash, describing him to us with great devotion. Second, in 2007 we were Australia’s Official War Artists, deployed into Iraq and Afghanistan for a period longer than any War Artist since the program was reinstituted in 1996, and during those deployments we spent all our time amongst soldiers on active duty, surprised by their complete support for war artists and humbled by their sense of public service. Ever since, our art has been dominated by reflections on the aftermath of war and the survival of the past into the present."

The overall image shows dawn light, during winter, illuminating a pathway through eucalypt trees and bush towards sunlight. The inset images are a combination of departures to war by ship from Australia, punctuated by visual comments (snaps of these young men, those who were about to enlist). We have deliberately chosen to make these images almost monochromatic—very tonal with a subtle but definite minimum of colour—as the weavers at ATW have repeatedly demonstrated enormous, subtle virtuosity in translating very tonal images with precise grey ranges into tapestry.

Morning Star was unveiled at the official opening of the SJMC in April, 2018.

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green are represented by Arc One Gallery.

Imants Tillers designed Avenue of Remembrance to coincide with the centenary commemorations of Gallipoli. It was unveiled at the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra in 2015.

Director of the AWM Dr Brendan Nelson said that the tapestry would “highlight the scale and grandeur of this imposing artwork, as well as commentating on the commitment of Australia’s service men and women over more than 100 years”. The tapestry was commissioned by the Australian War Memorial, through a very generous donation by the Geoff and Helen Handbury Foundation.

Tillers’ drew his inspiration for the design in-part from The Gallipoli letter—an 8000 word document written by Keith Murdoch during the early part of World War 1, remarking that:

"The letter is justifiably considered to be one of the National Library’s most important objects and the content of the letter is regarded as having helped bring an end to the Gallipoli campaign. In this letter Murdoch laments, “how young Australians, knowing that they would probably die were flocking to fight on Gallipoli’s “sacred soil’”.

The passionate and urgent tone of Murdoch’s letter and sometimes, even his turn of phase (“congealed incompetency”), immediately struck a chord with me when I first read it. Also by coincidence, it seemed to me, that I had already been using similar expressions in many of my works over the last decade: “There’s not a shred of hope”; “Stupefied by circumstance”; “The appalling silence”; “Purified by tears”; “A victim of what is infinitely close at hand”; to name a few. These were paintings reflecting on mortality, being, time, loss, grieving and remembrance, perhaps prompted by the death of my parents and several close friends in the passing decade. Typically these paintings combined image and text into a kind of visual spatial poem and I decided to use a similar approach for this project … I decided to eschew an exclusive focus on the tragic but national-defining event that was Gallipoli: (and its geography and topography) and to make reference to the whole of the Australian participation in World War 1.

The names of places where Australians were buried (rather than the actual theatres of war) are quoted as readymade poetic elements in my design. Thus familiar names such as ‘Anzac Cove’, ‘Shrapnel Valley’, ‘Lone Pine’, appear alongside other Middle Eastern locales: ‘Jerusalem’, ‘Gaza’, ‘Beirut’ and ‘El Alamein’. But the majority of the resting places of our war dead are European and less familiar French and Belgian places on what was called the Western Front: ‘Ypres’, ‘Polygon Wood’, ‘Poperinghe’, ‘Zonnebuke’, ‘Fromelles’, ‘Villers-Bretonneau’, ‘Peronne’, ‘Fleurbaix’ to name just a few.

In many places in the world including Australia there are ‘gardens of remembrance’ – beautiful, serene places commemorating the dead, especially those killed in the wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45. There are also ‘avenues of remembrance’ where each tree planted commemorates a particular, unique individual who died in action. These are beautiful, sad and redemptive places.

We all know that an ‘avenue’ is not only a regular planting of trees along a road, it is also more abstractly ‘a way to access or approach’ something – to an idea or even a memory. My ‘Avenue of Remembrance’ is, I hope, a way or means to remember not only those young men who died but also the profound loss and grief experienced by their mothers, their fathers, their brothers and sisters. By their friends, by their communities. By our nation."

Imants Tilles is represented by Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, GAGPROJECTS, Adelaide and Bett Gallery, Hobart.

Abstract Sequence, woven in 2004, was created to be added to the suite of tapestries that Roger Kemp designed for the Great Hall in the National Gallery of Victoria.

Kemp was one of the earliest artists to work with the Tapestry Workshop. His visual language of symbolic forms made for a dynamic translation into tapestry. Kemp’s tapestry Images was commissioned in 1978 and acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in the same year. In 1984 he designed the tapestry Evolving forms, commissioned by the NGV to hang in the Great Hall.

Evolving forms became the first in a suite of three tapestries designed by Kemp for, and conceived as a response to, the Great Hall and its extraordinary faceted glass ceiling designed by Leonard French. Both artists' works harmonise: the broad steel trusses of the vaulted ceiling, with its bright glass, find an echo in the charcoal bands that delineate the abstract forms and jewel-like colours of ruby-red, turquoise, lilac and amethyst-pink in Kemp's tapestries.

The three tapestries demanded varying technical approaches. The first tapestry, Evolving forms, was soft in colour and approach. Weaver Cheryl Thornton notes, 'It was only when it was installed in the Great Hall that we discovered the high viewing distance made the tapestry read as a painting. For the next tapestry in the suite, Piano movement, we decided to accentuate the work's medium as a textile. We did this by exaggerating the stepping - the movement up and across the warp threads... which created the effect of a rougher, more jagged surface, giving the work more of a textile feel.”

The third tapestry, Organic form, was slightly more subdued and provided a visual balance to the contrast of the preceding two works. Kemp was actively involved in the translation of the first two works, but died in 1987 before Organic form was complete.

Abstract sequence continues the composition and themes of the previous works. By this stage the weavers not only had extensive knowledge and technical expertise to undertake the translation, but also a great awareness of Kemp's artistic sensibility. Thornton noted that when you worked closely with Kemp's mark-making, you can see that “These marks resolved the whole painting. Abstract sequence and Unity in space were a reminder of what a great artist Kemp had been: it was humbling to work with an artist of his calibre.”

Roger Kemp was a major contributor to the development of abstract painting in Australia. His work is housed in major collections in Australia and overseas.

The ATW produced the monumental Great Hall Tapestry, spanning 9.18 x 19.9m, and designed by prominent Australian artist Arthur Boyd, for Parliament House in Canberra in 1988.

Boyd (1920-1999) is considered to be one of Australia's most distinguished 20th-century artists. He came from the Boyd dynasty of painters, sculptors, ceramicists and architects, and was part of the Angry Penguins school in the 1940s and later the Antipodeans, which included John Perceval and Charles Blackman. Boyd represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1958 and again in 2000. In 1979 he was awarded an Order of Australia, augmented by a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1992.

The design of Parliament House in Canberra was won by architect Romaldo Giurgola in 1979, and created the opportunity for the commission of a major public artwork. As an eminent living artist Arthur Boyd was offered the chance to produce an artwork that would cover almost the entire south wall of the Reception Hall. Extensive discussions ensued about the best medium to suit this scale, and tapestry was decided on as the ideal choice.

The tapestry design represents a forest of towering eucalyptus trees from the grounds of Boyd's rural retreat and studio at Bundanon. The tree-scape is quintessentially Australian, a homage to the majesty of the bush. Strong vertical rhythms structure the work, and the life-like proportions of the trees recreate the enveloping feel of a forest setting, fulfilling the architect's brief that the entire wall would almost appear as a three-dimensional living landscape.

The massive scale of the work - an astonishing nine meters in height and almost twenty meters in width - makes it the second largest tapestry in the world. It was woven in vertical sections by 12 weavers over a two-year period, and remains the most ambitious tapestry the Workshop has ever produced.

Arthur Boyd’s legacy is maintained through the Bundanon Trust collection and many major collections in Australia and overseas.

Woven in 1984, Roger Kemp’s Evolving Forms was designed to hang in the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV).

Kemp was one of the earliest artists to work with the ATW. His visual language of symbolic forms made for a dynamic translation into tapestry. Kemp’s tapestry Images was commissioned in 1978 and acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in the same year.

Evolving forms became the first in a suite of three tapestries designed by Kemp for, and conceived as a response to, the Great Hall and its extraordinary faceted glass ceiling designed by Leonard French. Both artists' works harmonise: the broad steel trusses of the vaulted ceiling, with its bright glass, find an echo in the charcoal bands that delineate the abstract forms and jewel-like colours of ruby-red, turquoise, lilac and amethyst-pink in Kemp's tapestries.

Roger Kemp was a major contributor to the development of abstract painting in Australia. His work is housed in major collections in Australia and overseas.