Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award 2025

From St Kilda to Kings Cross is thirteen hours on a bus
I pressed my face against the glass
and watched the white lines rushing past…

So wrote Paul Kelly in 1985 crossing Yorta Yorta Country — or Ned Kelly Country if you heed the pioneer history trail. But it’s another Australian singer-songwriter, Nick Cave, who has a childhood link with Wangaratta. Cave’s father was a history teacher in regional Victoria who as Director of the College of Advanced Education engaged with the Victorian Public Galleries Group in Melbourne in a period when regional galleries were jostling for their stake in the public cultural dollar.

Such detail is the stuff of Don Edgar’s book Art for the Country: The Story of Victoria’s Regional Art Galleries (2019) which I picked up on my first visit to Wangaratta Art Gallery (WAG) in 2024. Edgar gives a forensic, stitch-by-stitch account of the minutia of Australia’s regional gallery histories, and the people championing the regional art cause. These are perennial challenges, and responsiveness to location, to community, and to artistic excellence are all required for effective cultural leadership. These qualities were evident in Dianne Mangan’s Directorship of WAG from 1998–2016. In 2009, she established the Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award (WCTA), and as it grows in prominence, it remains a tribute to Mangan’s life’s work as an artist and advocate for the sector. 

Located between larger and better resourced galleries at Benalla and Albury, Wangaratta comes into Edgar’s book in the smaller towns chapter, but size and scale are subtle distinctions, and space has a feeling as much as a measure. As it stands, the refreshed heritage architecture, stained-glass and arched framework, timber floors and high wood-panelled ceiling evoke the ambience of the building’s history. The alternating flagship textile exhibitions include Petite Miniature Textiles and the acquisitive WCTA, now the country’s richest textile award at $40K. At nearly four times the average annual salary for practising female visual artists (the gender pay gap is amplified in the arts), it’s not surprising the award attracts ambitious works of scale and substance.^[1]

The 2025 award contains ten works—one per artist, nine of whom are women—selected from over 400 submissions, enough to mount a substantial salon de refusés.

The preselection team of WAG Director Rachel Arndt, artist Sepideh Farzam, 2023 winner, Katy Mitchell from Ararat Gallery TAMA and 2025 guest judge Blair French, CEO at Murray Art Museum Albury have presented a snapshot of the varied contemporary approaches to textile art. This is further underpinned with a well-designed catalogue and an overarching essay by Hannah Presley who was guest judge in 2021. It appears Arndt's goal is to make the award—a staple of regional art galleries—a critical survey of textile practitioners while investing in a sustainable community of artists.

This year’s winner Jemima Wyman is best known for her sharp-cut photographic collages of what appear to be sublime cloudscapes or visceral biology samples but are in fact collected from media images of political protest: tear gas, bomb blasts and toxic smokescreens, all in high saturation. Transposed to billowing polyester and nylon veils in Haze 19 (2024), its allegory of global unrest within a soft, interior domain speaks to our times, making it a likely winner.

Typically, artists with higher professional status and market value such as Wyman take out these acquisitive award prizes, but there were other works which were more invested in the materiality associated with textile art.

A standout example of this is Cara Johnson’s Overlay (2021-23), constructed of minute plastic beads cut from tree guards scavenged from her local Gadubanud / Otways landscape. The result is a glimmering ice-like quality that plays with optical sensation. Her reverse-garbage approach incorporating agricultural refuse points to an ethics of land use and the paradoxes inherent in green conservation and land care: partly futile, always fragile and never finite. Based on Bunjalung Country, Northern NSW, Charlotte Haywood's hybrid sculptures inspired by Australian native orchids speak to similar concerns, specifically the rapid loss of biodiversity that we all play a part in.

Drawing on ancestral practices and familial histories inform softly embroidered fabric works by Sera Waters and Elisa Jane Carmichael. Both had a spareness that could have been pushed further, though Carmichael took out the Highly Commended Ruth Avery Award, proving the subjective nature of judgement. The least conventionally beautiful work is Finnish-Australian artist Helvi Apted’s creature-like Felt in Time (2024), suspended from the rafters by its grasping tendrils. Crafted from discarded textiles that look like grey freight blankets, the quasi-garment holds uncanny associations with all kinds of grief and institutional control, establishing its presence as the most vulnerable and daring work: for this there is often no prize.

The formal affinities between Jacqueline Stojanović’s impressive Adria (2024) and Hannah Cooper’s study in greys, I was there (landscape at 110kph) (2024), both explicit grids, magnify the underlying structure of all warp and weft fabrics. Realised through painstakingly slow processes, weavings such as these are always carriers of cultural traditions, and as in Cooper’s work they readily imply nostalgia for a predigital world and offer a curative for the high sensory toll of pixellated social media traffic. The work captures the elemental hues of bleached timber, pasture and dust of the desiccated roadside panoramas of rural Victoria after a dry summer. Every road trip has its song.

This stripped back vernacular continues throughout Gallery 2, where I caught the last day of Blake Griffiths’ Trading Cloth. A finalist in the previous Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award, he presented one of the most resolved and thoughtful exhibitions that I have seen in any media. Inspired by a residency at the Icelandic Textile Centre in 2023, Griffiths’ textural and inter-textual investigations run wide and deep: from the Scandinavian tradition of vaðmál trading cloth and the polar differences between Icelandic and Merino wool to the nationalistic sheering imagery of Tom Roberts, Griffiths spins poetic form.

The well-trammelled story of Australia’s land degradation under cloven-hooved pastoralism is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to damage on our continent. It is heartening to see the environmental and ecological themes running through so many of the works across both galleries, and there’s a logic in holding these issues up to the light against a rural setting. But our impact knows no bounds: in Kelly’s love song to St Kilda, the beach needs reconstruction and the palm trees have it hard.