A New Earth

As the Black Summer fires raged in the Blue Mountains, artist Margarita Sampson, grounded herself in the present, breath by breath. In response to this visceral experience, she created these dramatic textile works that transfigure landscapes into beings, caught between crisis and action.

Made using salvaged and handmade textiles, knotted videotape, plastics and beading, these forms evoke the shimmering surfaces left in the wake of bushfires, the blackened twigs, embers and soot. Within each one, glowing quilted satin evokes the embers of slow-burning logs, but also a womb, a coffin, a cradle. The artist sees these interior spaces as places of refuge, regrowth and transformation.

Margarita’s blackened but strangely animate landscapes create a space for questioning and reflection, inhabiting the mythic borderlands of sentience and deep time. She asks, “How, as custodians and denizens of the hurting world, may we best proceed?”

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Image: Margarita Sampson, Fireground 2021 Photo: Courtesy of the artist