wallpaper - after agnes (2020)

This work is part of a series based on colonial Australian wallpapers. This one is inspired by an 1860s wallpaper from a cottage in Agnes Banks –originally land granted to an emancipated convict on traditional Darug country. (The convict named the grant, on the banks of Yarramundi Lagoon, after his mother Agnes.) The work is a re-imagining of the colonial by incorporating the indigenous. The diaper pattern of the original wallpaper is formed by the twisted roots of lantana, an invasive species, which frames colonial depictions of flora and fauna now considered threatened in Western Sydney.
The wallpaper patterns were inspired by historic wallpapers in the Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection at the Sydney Living Museums.

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