‘Welcome to Country - now you see me: seeing the invisible’, designed by renowned artists Maree Clarke (Yorta Yorta/Wamba Wamba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung) and Mitch Mahoney (Boonwurrung/Barkindji).

The design is inspired by microscopic images of river reeds from the Maribyrnong River. 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. The tapestry is also one of the largest ever produced at the ATW and the only tapestry ever woven at the ATW to be suspended in an ellipse installation.

‘Welcome to Country – now you see me: seeing the invisible’ is a tapestry commission supported by The Premier’s Suite partnership for the new Footscray Hospital. The Premier’s Suite is a partnership between the Tapestry Foundation of Australia, the State Government of Victoria and the Australian Hotels Association to fund the production of major tapestry commissions that are gifted to new Victorian hospitals. The new Footscray Hospital 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.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Maree Clarke is a Yorta Yorta Wamba Wamba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung woman who is a pivotal figure in the reclamation of southeast Australian Aboriginal art practices, reviving elements of Aboriginal culture that were lost - or lying dormant - over the period of colonisation as well as a leader in nurturing and promoting the diversity of contemporary southeast Aboriginal artists. She is represented by Vivien Anderson Gallery.

Mitch Mahoney is a proud Boon Wurrung artist and cultural educator who consults at Bunjilaka Melbourne Museum, Science Gallery and Footscray Arts Centre. Mitch regularly collaborates with his Aunt, Maree Clarke. Together they have produced significant commissions for the NGV and the Metro Tunnel Project. Mitch is focused on Indigenous Bio-Design in his practice with projects including The Biodegradable Eel Trap and Seven Canoe’s project.

TAPESTRY STATS AT A GLANCE

- 14 Victorian-based Australian Tapestry Workshop employees worked on the tapestry:

- 12 weavers

- 2 dyeing specialists

- 2 support staff

- The hand woven tapestry took the Australian Tapestry Workshop weavers over 10,000 hours to complete over a 14-month period.

- The tapestry weaving commenced in April 2024 and was completed in June 2025.

- The tapestry is 42 square metres (4.2m high x 10m wide).

- The tapestry weighs over 135 kilograms.

- The tapestry includes over 270 kilometres of weft yarn (the distance from the new Footscray Hospital to Yarrawonga in north-east Victoria).

- The tapestry used 103 yarn colours (including 8 custom-colours).

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Fact Sheet

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 1989 the ATW collaborated with John Coburn to produce St George tapestry, one of many works designed by Coburn and woven by the ATW.

John Coburn (1925-2006), more than any other Australian artist, displayed a true affinity with the tapestry medium. He lived and worked in France in the late 1960s and early 1970s, collaborating with the renowned French workshop Aubusson. The establishment of the ATW (then the Victorian Tapestry Workshop) allowed him to shift production and commence ongoing tapestry collaboration on home soil. The Workshop produced more than 25 tapestries based on Coburn’s designs, including works for Parliament House in Brisbane, National Australia Bank, Monash Medical Centre and many private and corporate collections.

In St George Tapestry, a commission for St George Building Society, Coburn wields his menagerie of anthropomorphic forms: a simplified vernacular of motifs like birds’ wings or fish tails, interspersed with abstract shapes. The composition is carefully constructed so that no forms overlap, but are arranged on a velvety ground as if they were object specimens laid for a naturalist’s view. Coburn’s curvilinear forms, however deceptively simple, posed a challenge for weaving.

John Coburn's works have been housed in major public and private collections, both nationally and internationally.

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.

Ring of Grass Trees, designed by Robert Juniper AM in 1978, was commissioned by the Friends of the Festival of Perth for Parliament House in Perth, Western Australia.

Juniper (1929 – 2012) was an Australian artist, art teacher, illustrator, printmaker and sculptor.

Juniper’s work is housed in several major Australian collections.