Juanita McLauchlan

Wagga Wagga–based Gamilaraay artist Juanita McLauchlan recognises the constellations above us, and the everyday pillars of family and community, as anchors we all have in common.

In her first state art museum exhibition, McLauchlan presents an ambitious new body of work that draws upon the intimacy of personal belongings and body adornments. Using domestic fabrics such as vintage blankets as a base, she works with leaves, animal pelts and other organic materials to print, eco-dye and embroider, creating works that aren’t constrained to a flat wall mounting, but are suspended in space

The exhibition, yilaa minyaminyabal maaru-ma-lda-y (soon everything will be healing), acknowledges the power of unity, connectedness and cultural reclamation to soothe historical burdens and strengthen future optimism. As an artist, McLauchlan is acutely aware of how she has been informed by the generations who have preceded her and how her actions in the present will inform the generations who will follow.

This exhibition is part of the Art Gallery’s Contemporary Projects series, which highlights the work of artists from NSW.

Juanita McLauchlan is a proud recipient of the 2024 National Regional Arts Fund Fellowship supported by Australian Government’s Regional Arts Fund.

'guuma-li /gather is about bringing family together and honouring the passing down of family heirlooms, heritage and stories, and contemplating what is lost along the way. The necklaces have been made from woollen blankets and possum skins, which I consider more valuable than gold and gems. When I feel them in my hands, I feel rich. These materials are deeply connective and grounding, embodying my identity and everyday life.'
Juanita McLauchlan 

Artspace is proud to present Gamilaraay artist Juanita McLauchlan’s first exhibition in Sydney. Guided by her Indigenous heritage, McLauchlan employs printmaking and fibre-based practices to explore her spiritual connection to Country and her cultural identity as an Aboriginal woman with English lineage. Her works consider how gathering and sharing ancestral knowledge preserves intergenerational ties across the past, present and into the future.

At the centre of guuma-li / gather is a new installation of seven large soft-sculpture necklaces, suspended together as a site of gathering. Intertwining native and colonial materials, McLauchlan regards these non-figurative forms as custodians of knowledge. Each of the necklaces embody a different generation of her family history with the seventh emblematic of her children. Alluding to body adornment, these wearable sculptures emanate a sense of warmth and safety, akin to being entangled in a network of familial roots. guuma-li / gather subtly reckons with the notion that cultural knowledge and memory can often be hidden and revealed. The woodcuts featured alongside the installation explore this through intuitive gestural marks and ambiguous textures of Country, eliciting something both familiar and unobtainable. 

guuma-li / gather is grounded by an innate connectedness. As each fibre loop is punctuated by the next, the singular becomes tangled with the collective, forming a profound experience of kinship, community, and gathering.

In gii mara-bula / Heart Hand-also Juanita McLauchlan draws upon her Gamilaraay identity, history and language to explore family connections in ambitious new works focussing on personal belongings and body adornments. Trained as printmaker, McLauchlan now makes enormous contact prints on blankets: they literally mirror back the beauty of Wiradjuri Country. Then she stitches the blankets or cuts them into strips to make necklaces combined with possum-fur, and bound with red thread symbolising connections of blood through generations. Like wool, cotton thread is an introduced European material, but McLauchlan does not deny this inheritance: she celebrates both sides of her family and herself.

This celebration is manifested when wool is combined with possum-fur, ethically sourced from New Zealand. In giirr ngiyani gulagamalaylaya / We will always hold each other the family’s histories are sewn together, using both Aboriginal and European stitches historically used for making blankets and capes. As Juanita McLauchlan says, ‘The exhibition title gii mara-bula / Heart Hand-also expresses my understanding as an Aboriginal person of continuities over time, that I share time with both ancestors and descendants.’