The Distance Travelled began in the artist’s fiftyninth year, conceived as a quiet reflection on the
threshold of turning sixty. What initially emerged as a meditation on ageing shifted as Melbourne
entered its prolonged COVID19 lockdowns. The stillness of the city, the solitude of the studio, and
the emotional weight of uncertainty reshaped the work, giving the series a deeper, more resonant
significance.

Constructed from vintage damask tablecloths—textiles historically tied to domestic labour,
hospitality, and the gendered work of care—the series foregrounds the feminist politics embedded
in cloth. These table linens carry the weight of women’s unpaid labour: the setting of tables, the
tending of households, the emotional and physical work of sustaining family and community.
During lockdown, when domestic spaces became sites of intensified pressure and responsibility,
these textiles gained new relevance. Dyed, rusted, and ecodyed into shifting tonal landscapes,
they hold the traces of rituals interrupted and the gendered expectations that persisted.

Linen strips reclaimed from old garments and threads repurposed from other makers are stitched
into the surfaces, forming layered compositions that resemble maps. These stitched pathways
trace movement, memory, and lived experience, but they also echo the routes women navigate
through domestic, social, and emotional labour—paths often unseen, unacknowledged, or
undervalued. In this context, stitching becomes a feminist act of reclamation: a way of asserting
agency within materials historically associated with women’s work, and of transforming domestic
textiles into sites of reflection, resistance, and selfdetermination.

The works evoke internal geographies—landscapes navigated through feeling rather than place.
Each line of stitching becomes a route taken, a pause, a return, or a departure, suggesting that
ageing itself is a form of mapping: acknowledging where one has been while continuing to imagine
where one might still go. For women, this mapping also involves tracing the distance travelled
within patriarchal structures, and the ongoing work of carving out space for autonomy, creativity,
and rest.

Although the artist hoped to exhibit the complete series during her sixtieth year, the pandemic
made this impossible. Individual works have since been shown, but the series has never been
presented in full. Seen together, The Distance Travelled becomes both a personal archive and a
feminist reflection on endurance—an insistence that women continue to move, adapt, and imagine
new futures, even when the world stands still.