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.

Since 2015, the Tapestry Design Prize for Architects (TDPA) has fostered exciting new creative dialogues between architects and tapestry weavers.

In 2023, architects were challenged to design a site specific tapestry for Kerstin Thompson Architect’s Bundanon Art Museum.

Showcasing the resulting ten finalists' designs, sections of these were woven as large format studies by weavers from the Australian Tapestry Workshop (ATW). Leonie Bessant, Chris Cochius, Amy Cornall, Saffron Gordon, Tim Gresham, Pamela Joyce, David Pearce, Emma Sulzer and Caroline Tully all responded individually to a section of each design that inspired or intrigued them. These sections act as propositions - providing a glimpse into their potential as fully realised tapestries.

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 May 2020, Weaving Futures gave 15 contemporary artists from around Australia the unique opportunity to develop concepts for contemporary tapestry, nurturing their professional development and creativity during an extraordinarily challenging time. Through re-imagining our usual commissioning process, an inspiring portfolio of ‘loom ready’ tapestry designs emerged — opening up the possibility for these artists to work with the ATW in the future.

In 2021, support for Weaving Futures from Creative Victoria and the Playking Foundation brought tapestry designs by artists Atong Atem, Troy Emery, Eugenia Lim and Hayley Millar Baker onto our looms. ATW weavers Pamela Joyce, Emma Sulzer, Tim Gresham, and Amy Cornall collaborated with these artists, working at the forefront of Australian contemporary art practice.

Troy Emery, a Melbourne-based artist, primarily works with textiles as a sculptural medium. He examines discourses surrounding the delineation between fine art, craft and decorative arts, as well as the use of animals as decorative motifs and tokens of ecological ruination.

Depicting a fantasy Wedgwood urn adorned with kangaroos and wallabies, 'big kangaroo urn' blends a classical ceramic form with kitschy domestic Australiana. Like the broader interests within Emery’s practice, this work draws on a rich historical narrative and the representation of animals, both real and imaginary, as an allegory in medieval tapestries.

The weaver, Emma Sulzer, blended wool and cotton in hues and tones to exaggerate Emery’s textural and naive application of oil on canvas. 'big kangaroo urn' is handwoven on a #18 warp loom at three warps per cm, with six strands of yarn per bobbin.

Reflecting on the collaboration, Emery said: ‘The Weaving Futures project provided a fantastic opportunity to me that adds several professional merits to my practice. For this to present itself during the difficult times of COVID-19 lock-down was above and beyond a positive experience. ATW is truly wonderful, and it’s such a pleasure to work with them’.

The 'big kangaroo urn' tapestry is generously supported by the Playking Foundation and Creative Victoria.

For sale enquiries: contact@austapestry.com.au +61 3 9699 7885

Bern Emmerichs designed North Facing in 2012 for the Northern Hospital in Epping.

Emmerichs grew up in the area where the Northern Hospital is located, and has created a design that cleverly and whimsically incorporates the nature and history of the area. Elements of the local landscape have been incorporated into the design, including the river red gums, the volcanic rocks, the Plenty Ranges and the Plenty River with historical references—from the early aboriginal inhabitants and European settlers through to modern urbanisation. Emmerichs has also alluded to local commercial and leisure pursuits, including the dairy industry, market gardens and horse racing.

The tapestry will be displayed in the prominent location of the entrance lobby of the hospital, providing a warm welcome to all those who come through the front entrance, as well as being visible to patrons of the hospital café.

The tapestry was created with the with the support the Australian Hotels Association and Anne Robertson and Mark Robertson OAM through the Tapestry Foundation of Australia.

Bern Emmerichs is represented by Maunsell Wickes Gallery, Sydney and Scott Livesey Galleries, Armadale.

In 2012 the ATW collaborated with David Noonan for the second time to create Untitled, a monochromatic work inspired by the artist’s extensive archive of found images.

This tapestry relates to a body of work in which Noonan created new works through screen-printing and collaging found images on linen. Presenting costumed figures set against richly patterned backgrounds, the subjects seem to be caught between moments of introspection and exhibitionism. For Untitled the artist produced a number of potential images, and the chosen work was selected by the ATW in consultation with the artist. Unlike many of the ATW's other projects, this artwork exists only as the original digital image and finished tapestry.

The work is composed of two layers: the face and a superimposed layer of Japanese Boro textiles, fashioned from stitched-together rags of previously dyed fabric. Because of this layering, the weavers used separate images of each layer to guide their interpretation.

The palette for this work is the same as in our first collaboration with Noonan, Untitled from 2009. The weavers initially tried to introduce some subtle blue and purple tones, but ultimately felt that the monochromatic grey palette was more sophisticated and better suited to the piece. The result is a work of dramatic yet enigmatic intensity.

On April 2, 2012 the tapestry was cut off the loom by special guests Penny Hutchinson, Director of Arts Victoria, and Colleen Noonan, the artist’s mother.

Untitled was exhibited in the 2010 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art; the Hayward Gallery’s British Art Show 7L In the Days of the Comet; in Daydream Believers at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art and was the highlight of the ATW’s stall at the Melbourne Art Fair. The work is now housed in a reputable private collection.

David Noonan is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney.

In 2011 the ATW was privileged to translate the painting Kunawarritji to Wajaparni into a tapestry. The artwork was created collaboratively by eight Indigenous male artists from regions around the Canning Stock Route.

The artists—Clifford Brooks, Jeffrey James, Putuparri Tom Lawford, Peter Tinker, Richard Yukenbarri Tjakamarra, Charlie Wallabi Tjungurrayi, Helicopter Tjungurrayi and Patrick Tjungurrayi—come from a range of different cultural groups. Their varied histories and languages add depth and distinctiveness to the work. The artists have painted their ancestral country, and the Tjukurrpa (Dreaming) and personal stories that mark the land.

The Canning Stock Route, running almost 2,000 km across Western Australia, marks an intersection of Indigenous and non-Indigenous histories. Their painting depicts the layout of the land where, for generations, their tribes have come together to trek from waterhole to waterhole, covering the 200km between Kunawarritji to Wajaparni.

The original painting was acquired by the National Museum of Australia in 2008. In creating the tapestry, the weavers faced challenges, especially since the NMA was unable to loan the painting. The weaving team visited Canberra to view and photograph the work, and three of the artists visited the ATW to discuss the interpretation with the weavers, as part of the collaborative process.

Kunawarritji to Wajaparni was commissioned by the Tapestry Foundation of Australia, and supported by the Eldon Hogan Trust and The Jean Elizabeth Ryan Charitable Trust.

Ben McKeown, descendant of the Wirangu language group of the Far West Coast of South Australia, designed Spring Street end in 2011 to reference the hidden Aboriginal history of Melbourne.

Commissioned for the State Library of Victoria (SLV) by the Tapestry Foundation of Australia, with funding from the Marjorie J Kingston Charitable Trust, Spring Street end extends upon McKeown’s interest in the practicalities of urban space, dwellings, identity and culture.

The areas of black and dots in the corners of the design represent plants within the area of Spring St in Melbourne’s CBD. Using plants as a metaphor for the stories and physical / historical markers of the Indigenous history of this area, the artist comments on the attempted destruction of an Aboriginal presence within Melbourne, as a result of colonization, and the persistence of an Indigenous voice despite of this destruction.

Through their interpretation, the weavers have broken down the broad areas of colour within the design into shapes. Each area is treated as a separate segment, using contrasting tones to describe the detail. The weavers have kept the tones in the bobbin mixes similar, using an approximate 2/3 tone-shift, to keep the shapes created from the design clear and vibrant.

At the beginning of the interpretation process the weavers had the opportunity to take their samples into the SLV to discuss the design with McKeown. Through this experience the weavers discovered that the pitch of the blue they had used for the samples was too grey and not vibrant enough for the space. The weavers worked with ATW dyer Tony Stefanovski to develop a blue that sits slightly outside our standard range and has a more purple-blue base tone. During the sampling the weavers also noticed that the black, which dominates the borders of the shapes, was very cold. They experimented with mixing the black with other colours and have included a variety of additional tones in each bobbin, depending on what the black border is surrounding. For the red houses, a few brown threads have been included. For the borders that divide the sky and houses, blue threads have been included. This colour-mixing softens the harshness of the areas of black within the design.

The original artwork that the weavers referred to for this project was a digital print of a painting. Relying on a reproduced image can be potentially fraught, as each printer will produce slight variations in colour. Some accidental colour details, resulting from the printing process, have been incorporated into the tapestry schema, through discussion with the artist, to create a truly original interpretation of the design.

Ben McKeown is represented by Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne.

In 2010 the ATW collaborated with celebrated Indigenous artist Ruby Williamson to translate her painting Puli Murpu into tapestry. Williamson is of the Pitjantjatjara language group, born near Amata in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunyjatjara lands in South Australia.

Born in the 1940s, Williamson is a senior law woman of her country and her skills are based in fostering law and culture, storytelling, hunting, punu (wooden carving), dancing and painting.

The weavers have constructed the tapestry palette of bobbin mixes using solid, flat colour with mainly woollen yarn and small amounts of cotton in similar tones, to add lustre and to ‘lift’ the mix. As there is a lot of visual information in the design, the weavers felt this was a good way to capture the rhythms of the marks in the design, while keeping the colours clear and uncluttered.

The colours were carefully chosen to describe the foreground, middleground and background layers of the delicately painted dots and flat background colour. In the bottom left hand corner, for example, the two yellow tones, one pale and one strong, sit forward to the turquoise blue background. The coloured woven background areas shift the colour in response to the different foreground detail colours: the yellow makes the turquoise appear greenish; the purple allows the turquoise to appear to have more blue tones.

Through their interpretation of the design, the weavers have linked the woven dots, minimising the amount of hand sewing required. Generally when weaving, multiple colours of cotton thread are used to sew up slits that occur between shapes and colours, along the length of a warp thread. The weavers have had to balance the rhythm of the dots in the design with the constraints of the warp threads, keeping the rhythm of the forms and the relationships between the colours, background areas and dots of the original design.

In 1999, the senior women of Amaṯa, including Williamson, founded Minymaku Arts, now called Tjala Arts.

In 2010 Ngayuku Ngura (This is my country), a painting designed by senior Pitjantatjara artist and elder Nyankulya Watson, was translated into tapestry as the latest addition to the Embassy Collection series, commissioned by the Tapestry Foundation of Australia.

Watson was born around 1938 at a rock hole near Mt Aloysius, in remote Western Australia, close to the South Australian border. As a teenager she lived at Anumarapiti, now an outstation of Irrunytju, later moving to Ernabella in northern South Australia (then a Presbyterian mission). Watson was a founding member of Irrunytiju Arts and she now lives in the Nyapari and Kalka communities in South Australia.

Speaking of the painting, Watson notes that there “are many rock holes close to the place I was born. I would travel to all these places with my parents. Ngayuku ninti pulka (I know all this country). Aloysius is the main rock hole. The other rock holes in this painting are Pukara, Anumarapiti, Palki, Punuwara, Wangutiti, Atanga, Yaliri, Plalkarli and Wirkuratja. This country is in Western Australia. The lines are the travelling tracks in the sand from all the people walking to the waterholes and places where the bush foods grow."

The strong red and magenta tones, contrasting with the black of the background, create a tension which is disrupted by the change in scale and media, from painting to tapestry. To help balance the black background with the reds, the weavers used a blue-black and a grey-black, allowing the blacks to recede slightly, and the reds to eloquently emerge.

Ngayuku Ngura (This is my country) was commissioned by the Tapestry Foundation of Australia, and funded by private donations.

Watson now paints for Tjunga Palya and Ninuku Artists in South Australia.

In tribute of Dame Elizabeth Murdoch’s 75-year relationship with the Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH), the RCH Foundation commissioned The games children play, designed by Robert Ingpen AM in 2009.

There is a well established understanding of the importance between art and healing, within hospital environments. This tapestry is a playful way to provide those using the hospital’s facilities with a colourful and amusing distraction, while they may be coping with more serious health concerns. Established in 1989 the RCH Foundation works tirelessly to raise funds for a number of different projects, such as state-of-the-art medical equipment, ongoing paediatric research programs and scholarships for medical and allied health professional staff.

Having illustrated over 100 published books and worked across stamp design, sculpture design and public mural commissions, Ingpen was a fitting selection as designing artist for this specific commission. Ingpen has a long-standing relationship with the ATW, having designed the Melbourne Cricket Ground tapestry in 2004.

For The games children play, Ingpen sought inspiration from the painting titled Games Children Play by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, painted in 1590. Using the format and flat picture plane of this work as a starting point, Ingpen has re-set and re-cast this work within a twenty first century context.

This tapestry was a true collaboration between Ingpen and the weaving team. Throughout the weaving process, a number of alterations and adjustments were made to the design, brightening the palette and developing the characters to reflect the true multicultural cross-section of Australian communities. The children and families using the hospital can spend time looking and finding the different characters in the tapestry. The vibrant and energetic representations of the figures will inspire even the most sedentary viewer and add to their understanding of the possibilities of play.

One of the many challenges this tapestry represents is the shaded background, which changes from a deep to a pale gold. This is complicated by the multitude of figures that break it up making the continuity of this gradation more difficult to keep even. The weavers used a cross-hatching technique to keep these subtle changes soft. In contrast, the weavers have made the figures appear much sharper, breaking them down to strong block colours, to give them an animated and playful feel.

Robert Ingpen is represented by Melaleuca Gallery in Victoria.

In 2008 Jon Cattapan designed The Visitor, commissioned specifically for The Performing Arts Centre at Xavier College in Melbourne.

Cattapan has spent the last 30 years depicting the urban environment and exploring ways of conveying a sense of identity and place. The tapestry design presents an aerial view of a nocturnal light-streaked cityscape, with a cluster of figures in the foreground. The city lights can also be read as computer pixels or datasets.

When discussing the design, Cattapan noted:

“The Visitor shows a group of youths in a vast panoramic landscape that appears to have elements of many cities within it. It is a dissolving, fluid vista that speaks of an age of digital global information - of floating bytes of data. In the foreground is an arrival. For the visitor, the potential journey is one of hope and belonging, whilst for the group, what is represented is not only a newcomer but symbolically the challenge of new ideas."

Xavier College used the creation of The Visitor as an opportunity to involve students on a curriculum level. The artist gave a series of lectures at the school and students undertook projects at the Workshop, such as filming an interview with the artist and recording the various stages of the tapestry production.

Jon Cattapan has exhibited widely in museum and commercial shows throughout Australia and overseas.

In 2006 weavers of the ATW had the pleasure of interpreting Glyphs, designed by G W Bot, into a tapestry spanning 1.9 m x 3.97 m.

G.W. Bot is a contemporary Australian printmaker, sculptor and graphic artist who has created her own signs and glyphs to capture her close, personal relationship with the Australian landscape. Her artist’s name derives from ‘le grand Wam Bot’—the early French explorers term for the wombat, which she has adopted as her totemic animal.

G W Bot is represented by Australian Galleries in Melbourne and Sydney.