Amelia Skelton - A thousand attics

'One person’s trash is another’s treasure. So the saying goes… Amelia has long collected fabrics and textiles, attracted to the countless untold histories held in their fibres – of the people who bought or wore or made or used them. That is the beautiful thing about textiles: they are made by and for humans.

The textiles in Amelia’s collection have been accumulated over years, purchased from second-hand stores, found, or gifted by family and friends. Rescuing textiles from the inevitable trash heap, Amelia reworks them into something new and beautiful, imbuing them with a value beyond their primary function. The reverence with which Amelia treats her materials is evident, not only in the finished works, but in the way her collection of fabrics is lovingly folded and organised in her studio. 

The patchwork quilts in this exhibition hold glimpses into multiple universes. For this new body of work, Amelia has used collected and archived digital images, rather than fabrics. Well, some of the images are of fabrics in her collection, following on from her recent exhibition Everything is Sacred, for which she inventoried her fabric collection. Also thrown into the mix are digitised scans – of historic family photographs gifted by Amelia’s grandma, and of archeological sites, found and purchased from Reverse Garbage near her studio in Marrickville (this discovery felt serendipitous: Amelia had been exploring the notion of excavation as a metaphor for memory) – as well as photos Amelia took of collections, her own and those of her partner and mum. Using this database of categorised images, Amelia has created digital patchworks that explore the notion of memory and connection. Printed onto sheer fabric and sewn into quilts, the images held within these pieces have been transported from the real to the digital to the real again. Cropped and removed from context, the many stories these quilts hold are only hinted at, allowing the viewer to fill in the gaps, to discover the threads and create their own narratives.'

Excerpt from the exhibition text by Laura Couttie