The paper and exhibition discusses my current practice of utilising vintage linen ‘Australiana’ tea towels, tablecloths and placemats, ‘Made in Poland’, and from which I am making ‘wianek’. Engaging in this practice is the next iteration of ongoing research into the impact of a gendered, familial intergenerational haunting; namely, the WW2 deportation and death of my Polish grandmother to Siberia from the borderland region, the ‘Kresy’. Whereas the original project’s focus was a necessary ‘mourning’ of the silenced, unknown Other, this work seeks to challenge notions of women’s containment and instead celebrate the generativity of herstories.

The ‘Australiana’ textile, be it a tea towel, a tablecloth, or a place mat, and the traditional ‘wianek’ headdress, can both be located within the paradigm of the domestic and contained. Even so, the unique cultural signifiers with which both these objects are inscribed also locate them Outside – in nature, with the wild, the exotic, and that Other that refuses containment. By de/reconstructing material vocabularies of the textile object I seek to address further this haunted women’s wound of ‘historical containment’ and unsettle fixed notions of identity, beyond the temporal, cultural and geographical.