Cloudy with a Chance of Mum Storms by Lottie Emma & here one moment by Tania Hirschausen.
Lottie Emma
Lottie Emma is a Fleurieu-based textiles artist living and working on the traditional lands of the Ngarrindjeri/Ramindjeri people. She is known for her use of intricate embroidery and hand-dyed found and repurposed fabrics. More recently her work has embraced experimentation, fast-paced processes, loose expressive forms, aerosol and soft sculpture. Her work explores themes of disempowerment, resilience and hope – ideas which are deeply informed by her experience as a mother to a special needs child. Through her work she explores how contemporary textiles can tell stories, share personal experiences and be a tool for catharsis.
Emma has a background in fashion design and wearable art, studying a Bachelor of Creative Arts in Fashion, TAFE SA, and formally studying textiles at the University of Tasmania’s School of Art. Her highly detailed embroideries have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the Barossa, Adelaide and Flinders Ranges. Recently there has been a radical shift in her practice following participation in the Country Arts SA Nebula program (2023) and Studio Snapshot (2024), which has propelled her professional growth, encouraged material exploration and instigated changes to her style and conceptual approach.
Lottie Emma feels the world. Cloudy with a Chance of Mum Storms is about humanness: wrangling emotions, championing compassion, speaking out and keeping it real.
Emma’s practice springs from an appreciation of traditional textiles skills developed by generations of women as carers. Her early exquisite floral embroideries on hand-dyed fabrics are very accomplished. However, primarily made to meet market-driven tastes, something felt missing. The 2023 Country Arts SA Nebula was a catalyst for a thrilling transformation, which Emma describes as “tearing open the seams” of her practice, allowing herself to “go rogue”.
Unshackled from fiscal and aesthetic expectations, she turned to her experiences as a mother raising a special needs child amidst acutely flawed systems riddled with cracks. Needle and thread in hand and bursting to scream with rage and frustration at society’s devaluing of neuro diversity, she summoned her vulnerability and her true voice. Radically experimental, conceptual soft sculptures emerged, using discarded textiles, free machine embroidery, hand stitching, aerosols, acrylics and crafting materials with electrifying immediacy. These highly intuitive works unpick and articulate her palpable narrative about processing intense emotions.
Holding space for the value of playfulness in navigating absurd systemic failures, Emma’s practice is now fuelled by fun, curiosity and an empowering acceptance of the glorious diversity in how our brains are wired. In a spirit of anarchy against dominant ‘normative behaviour’, she takes cues from her adult son’s wonderfully lateral and hilariously literal ways of perceiving the world.
Audacious, courageous, vibrant and raw, her works speak of fragility, tenacity and resilience through her materials, iconography and processes. Repurposing fabrics suggests salvaging the neglected, choosing textures to reflect a gamut of emotions: stiff tulle lightning bolts symbolise a mother’s determined advocacy, while soft chiffon clouds pour out her depleted energy. Like portals to our shared sentience, recurring eyes are metaphors for humanity, as well as the weighty responsibility to constantly keep watch for her son’s everyday safety. Stitch work evokes ‘mending’ something or someone, as well as piercing perceptions and poking at holes in the system. Pushing traditional techniques to extremes, impossibly long bullion knots embody the delicate balance a mother needs, to keep it all together for everyone, holding firm but not too tightly to remain intact and tangle-free.
Often referring to herself as a “brewing storm”, Emma is both emboldened and exhausted by her “advocacy against the ludicrous” to protect her family. As a form of release, she tackles overwhelming expectations and depressive seriousness with humour and a freedom of imagination that’s so often beaten out of us by demands to conform to a linear cognitive framework. Stitch by stitch she prods at societal judgments, to dissolve stigmas of brokenness about people, as she says, “who think outside the box and never seem to fit in the square”.
Echoing the polymorphic nature of humanity, Emma’s rambunctious amorphic and biomorphic forms are unapologetically candid in expressing profound, complex and enormous feelings. Cloudy with a Chance of Mum Storms is a story of the loving tenderness of a raging tempest.
Fulvia Mantelli
Tania Hirschausen
Tania Hirschausen is an emerging curator and cultural practitioner living and working on Kaurna land. After a decade working as a Photographer and Visual Arts Educator, she graduated with a Masters in Curatorial & Museum Studies from the University of Adelaide in 2017. During her Masters, she interned for twelve months in both the Contemporary Art and Prints, Drawings & Photographs departments at the Art Gallery of South Australia. In 2017 she travelled to Switzerland to undertake further studies in curating with the Oncurating Summer Academy at the Zurich University for the Arts.
In addition to her independent creative curatorial practice, Hirschausen works as Assistant Curator with Post Office Projects Gallery + Studios and as Project Lead, Partnerships & Projects within the Arts & Culture team at the City of Adelaide.
Liliana Pasalic, Interbeing 2, 2024.
Sundari Carmody, Hora Somni: for Vera Rubin, 2017.
Mish Meijers, Loud Towers, 2024.
John Barbour, Where the Words Go (detail), 2005.
I am a collection of thoughts and memories and likes and dislikes. I am the things that have happened to me and the sum of everything I’ve ever done… I am every place and every person and every object I have ever come across. I am a bag of bones stuck to a very large rock spinning a thousand miles an hour. [1]
here one moment brings together artists in contemplation on the fragility of human life and the meaning of our shared contemporary existence.
John Barbour described his work as a process of ‘unmaking’, embracing the imperfect and unpredictable. A meditation on human frailty, failure and mortality, his work is soft and ephemeral: the delicate, diaphanous cloth reminiscent of yielding flesh and funeral veils. There are inkblots, stitches and stains. There are tears and frays: trauma, damage. Some areas appear almost solid, others are barely perceptible. More than the sum of its parts, his work is like us: uniquely exquisite, messy, in a constant state of decay. The only thing that can be certain in this life is death. Here one moment.
Here we are, embodying this moment, digitally connected to (almost) everyone while simultaneously detached. Scroll. Brain rot.
Meanwhile, Mish Meijers is getting back to basics. In her unique style of optimistic activism, she creates life from the elemental, a simultaneous parody and rejection of the superficial and superfluous. In full technicoloured splendour, Meijers denies the relentless stream of all-consuming junk that pervades our contemporary existence, and returns us to more tangible origins, reminding us that we belong to something real. Formed over millenia, we are human strata with myriad complex ancestries, ‘a culmination of everyone and everything we have seen or heard or touched’. [2] We are here, and we are in this together.
Art, culture and language evidence our connection to everything, from the cellular to the cosmic. Liliana Pasalic has keen instincts and a sharp eye for these connections. Through a symphony of techniques, her materials entwine, refusing to submit to classification or even to conform to the limits of the canvas itself. What has for aeons been touted as ‘high’ and ‘low’ converge and conflate, an open and honest reflection of existence and apt middle finger to those who wish to deny the true spectrum of art and culture, of humanity, and of nature.
Sundari Carmody reminds us that of all that is real and true and necessary, much is shrouded in mystery. Beyond our ability to fully observe or comprehend. Carmody sublimely points to what is both elusive and supremely obvious: the world turns, darkness reveals the rich silken hues of galactic splendour, and our bodies respond accordingly. At once elemental and invisible: the subliminal rhythms and forces of nature, the cosmos, reside within us.
Hora somni: sleep, dark matter, death. Conscious, subconscious, unconscious. Our earthly span folds itself into the earth’s foundation, the strata. Significantly insignificant. Here one moment, then silence, eternally hurtling through space and time. Connected to it all. Before, now and always, forever and ever. Amen. [3]
Tania Hirschausen
1. Macauley Culkin quoted by @chloessevigny, ‘Sometimes I ❤ actors’, Instagram.
2. Mish Meijers, here one moment artist statement, 2024.
3. Beyoncé, “AMEN”, Oakland 13 Music, track 27 on COWBOY CARTER, 2024