Juanita McLauchlan
guuma-li / gather

'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 

Guided by her Indigenous heritage, Gamilaraay artist Juanita 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.