To Handle / To Hold centres the material of clay and fibre as barometers of cultural history. It is a complex interrogation of social politics, identity and the sensory of the handmade in the digital age. Featuring the works of four emerging artists – Kyiesha Booth, Alice Royds, Anisha Sawaid and Sirinya Stuebe – the exhibition juxtaposes textiles with ceramics, alongside the convergence of materials and concepts in a single artwork or across an individual’s practice. Through material crossings of fibre and clay, the assembly of sculpture and installation redirects signifiers of domestic space and female labour to contemporary art and social discourse.
About the artists
Kyiesha Booth is Indigenous Artist based on Gadigal land sydney. Her current practice explores personal experiences and organic forms found in nature. Kyiesha completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the National Art School, where she majored in sculpture. She has undertaken two internships with Aurora at Martumili Artists. Kyiesha was awarded the National Art Schools First Nations Scholarship 2023–25, the National Art School Shirley Randell Student Award 202,The Arts matters mentorship award (2025- 26). Her artwork has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions such as Objectectality, Goodspace (2025) and Groundwork, Rofe Street Gallery (2024).
Alice Royds is a multidisciplinary artist practicing on Gadigal land whilst completing her Honours at the National Art School, where she is specialising in ceramics. In her body of work, Alice is exploring practices she describes as “ritualistic feminine behaviours”; habits or activities that have been defined as traditionally and historically feminine. Practices surrounding textiles are of particular curiosity, especially the rituals, storytelling and symbols embedded in quilt making. Solid ceramic surfaces immortalise delicate patterns of lace and fabric, imbuing a strength to the fabric in honour of the way that women’s craft has always been an art form. An intimacy of labour emerges in the disciplinary crossover between ceramics and textiles; the rigid patchwork tiles lack the malleability of fabric creating a slow and laborious process in creating. Each quilt is made with a personal relationship in mind, the final product being a physical manifestation to honour a bond shared.
Anisha Sawaid is an emerging designer based on Gadigal land. Weaving forms the core of her practice, examining the slow, meticulous craft and its links to nature, culture and technology. Her recent works reimagine traditional weaving techniques and motifs through a more technological lens by utilising code to translate data sets. This new dialogue between ancestral practices and digital systems offers space for hands-on experimentation and new discoveries. Her upcoming research and body of works begin to dive into her Bedouin-Palestinian heritage to strengthen the diasporic connection with her cultural identity and family roots. Anisha continues to ground her work in design thinking and strengthen technical skills in the weaving practice.
Sirinya Stuebe is an emerging Thai-Australian artist based on Dharug, Gundungurra and Gadigal lands. Primarily working with sculptural forms, her practice often comes back to found materials, including objects, recycled fabrics, language, and most recently sound, using these materials to reframe how we engage with our everyday lives and identities. Interactive installation is a key element in her work, exploring the audience as inherent to the artwork, whether this is through sensory, textual or interactive experiences.
To Handle / To Hold brings together the practices of Alice Royds, Kyiesha Booths, Sirinya Stuebe and Anisha Sawaid – artists working across textiles and ceramic to explore ways material carry, contain and convey.
Across the exhibition, acts of making become acts of holding, memory, labour, identity and care. Textile and clay serve not just as mediums but as conduits through which personal and cultural narratives are shaped. Textile and clay carry complex and old histories as materials that are tied to both expression and survival. Used for shaping vessels, weaving fiber, marking time through touch; these forms hold an inherent intimacy. These practices register the body, the hand and the motions of this labour in a way that is both visible and felt.
While the way these artists approach the mediums differs, they all share an investment in the relationship between body and material. For some, handling speaks to inherited knowledge and connection; for others it becomes a means of processing experience, negotiating and asserting presence and memorialising place.
To Handle / To Hold foregrounds the reasons these artists turn to these materials; they are a tool of resistance preservation, intimacy and transformation. To Handle / To Hold invites viewers to consider what it means to cross and respect the material, to touch and be touched in return.
Co-curator
Jessica Montecinos
To Handle/ To Hold provides a glimpse into current intersectional practices of ceramics and textiles. It centres materials associated with craft as barometers of cultural history, while setting up a complex interrogation of entanglements with politics, identity and the sensory in the digital age. Through the convergence of fibre and clay, the works of four young emerging artists reveal stories of migrant culture, women’s labour and transcultural experiences. Richly layered in meaning, the exhibition can be understood through several key theoretical frameworks.
Material Dichotomy and Dualism
Aesthetic tensions are evident between clay’s rigid permanence and textile’s fluid malleability. Material friction challenges human sensory perception and disrupt passive visual consumption. The hard/soft dualism precipitates a phenomenological turn, triggering “haptic vision” where the viewer’s brain simulates the physical sensation of touching the work just by viewing from the distance. This material contradiction disrupts cognitive expectations, compelling the audience into a state of active awareness of both the art object and the space it inhabits.
Decolonising Craft and Gender Hierarchies
The fusion of fibre and clay, as well as their juxtaposition subvert historical hierarchies that marginalised women’s work, relegating textiles and ceramics to domestic spaces of specific function and at best decorative arts. It is a response to institutional biases rooted in patriarchal art histories. Until recent times, fine art academies maintained a rigid class system that elevated media like stone and metal sculpture while dismissing needlework, woven fibres and artisanal ceramics. This hard/monumental and soft/domestic separation was upheld in the Bauhaus era of the 1920s and 1930s and intensified during Mid-century Modernism, championed by critics like Clement Greenberg. The collapse of historical binaries between fine art and craft as well as fibre and clay enables artists of colour and women artists to reclaim material sovereignty. In presenting artworks of such materiality in a formal setting, it dissolves the ideological and spatial divide of craft and fine art, function and intellectualism, private sanctuary and public platform.
Body, Domesticity and Transcultural Lived Experience
Ceramics and textiles are tactile materials that act as active repositories of memory, dislocation, vulnerability, CaLD and Third Culture Kid experiences. In contemporary diasporic and transcultural practices, materials function as portable vessels of heritage and surrogates for displaced bodies and hybrid identities. The physical manipulation of fibre and clay is a symbolic nod to the psychological blending of disparate heritages required to navigate two distinct worlds simultaneously. Craft material and medium are adapted for reimagination, synthesis of cultural influences and the hand-made with the digital. Through these lenses, the domestic space is reframed as a site where family histories are continuously renegotiated to form a unique, third cultural identity.
Interdisciplinary Synergies
Moving beyond conventional gallery contexts, the material intersections lend themselves to further cross-overs into the performative and digital arts. This continues the trajectory of contemporary arts practice, which views material disciplines as collaborative and integrated. For instance, Sriniya Stuebe’s installation Organ is conceived as a multi-part organism combining textile and sound. Anisha Sawaid’s Wollemi Weave is a tactile, textile woven format of data visualisation, encoding scientific datasets ofDNA, growth, location, and rising temperatures generated from Wollemi Pines conservation.
The construct of the exhibition as multi-layered material crossing invites audiences to engage in personal stories, cultural narratives and social commentary through the material, texture and spatial relations of the work.
Co-curator
Rachael Kiang