Lithgow artist Anna Carter has taken over the library with a litany of sculptural, textile and video works, many reflecting on her parents’ lifetimes, journeying from war-torn Slovenia to a new home in Australia.
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“It was late 50s for my Dad and early 60s for my Mum, she worked in the Bonds factory in Camperdown,” Ms Carter said.
A series of sculptural works using the wire from abandoned mattresses tie in with Carter’s memories of playing outside a Camperdown mattress factory, waiting for her mother to finish work.
“People dump them [mattresses] in Sydney and I began playing with them in 2012, using them as a base for my medium. They contain so many paradoxes: that we spend a huge part of our life on them and treat them with total disregard.”
Weaving and lacework is a technique visible across the exhibition. Ms Carter said it reflected the silence and connections that bind parents and children.
“It’s a self portrait of what we inherited from them. It’s turbulence in a sense, it’s not precise, it’s not neat what you get between generations, in the first wave of migration.”
She said her parents spoke very little about leaving Slovenia (then communist Yugoslavia), but she had discovered her father delivered messages for the partisans as a young boy and her mother’s father hid civilians.
A series of tapestries along the right wall from the entrance of the library are embroidered with the words ‘once upon a time’ in Slovenian and English phonics.
“It’s about my parents learning the sound of the English language and trying to fit, and also getting your children to fit into white Australian culture.”
Anna Carter is presenting an artist walk and talk at Lithgow Library at 3.30pm on Tuesday, April 24. Her exhibition ‘Death, Cycles and the Lines Between’ continues until the end of April.