Awash, 2016
Cotton, sugar, moving image installation
Catalogue text By Emily McDaniel:
Muslin cloth is imbued with domestic history, being commonly used in the kitchen as well as mending garments and healing wounds. The fabric is also manipulated through Tamara Baillie’s alchemical process as she sets the muslin with a sugar- cured solution, transforming the fragile material into a fiberglass-like state.
Her artistic practice considers ways to conceal, disguise and control histories, ideas and identities. Awash traces and maps the primary waterways on which Europeans and Indigenous peoples first interacted with one another – Broken Bay, Port Jackson and Botany Bay. Tamara is from a family with a history of boatmakers and sailors. By subverting the functionality of the map and rendering it entirely arbitrary, Baillie challenges the masculine accounts of mapping Sydney’s shorelines and places it with her personal and familial history.
Images: Jessica Maurer Photography