Emotive exhibition reflects women’s stories of trauma and homelessness
News of the South Australian Royal Commission into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence provided the inspiration for What Women Hold, a powerful new exhibition of moving works created by women who have experienced homelessness and trauma.
When local creatives Miranda and Claire Harris heard about plans for the South Australian Royal Commission into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence, they knew they wanted to respond to the issues in a meaningful and visual way.
Miranda, a practising artist and teacher, and Claire, an anthropologist, filmmaker and artist, run The Art Bus, a mobile art studio involved in a range of community-based arts programs.
The sisters work at local women’s homelessness centre Catherine House once a week, sharing their art practice with the women there who have experienced some form of homelessness and domestic and sexual violence.
Sisters Miranda and Claire Harris, with The Art Bus.
It was through talking to these women that Miranda and Claire decided to curate a multi-media exhibition called What Women Hold, featuring works created by the women at Catherine House that reflect their lived experience of homelessness, domestic and sexual violence, mental health struggles, losing their children and other related traumas.
“We wanted to somehow mark the Royal Commission or contribute to it and give people an opportunity to think through their own thoughts and experiences about the subjects,” Claire says.
“But we don’t come in and do short-term art projects with people. We really take time to build relationships with people, and once you begin to build these relationships, and trust in each other, we can have discussions and talk about the tough subjects.
“We had the opening the other night and two women from the program spoke, and I did as well. People in the audience were in tears. But this is not a kind of pity process. It’s just they were so powerful in sharing their stories and messages.”
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From embroidered names to paper mâché bowls
The exhibition, which was 12 months in the making and involves the works of 20 women, as well as Miranda and Claire, is currently on at the Hawke Centre’s Kerry Packer Civic Gallery at the University of South Australia. It includes paintings, monoprints, collage, textile work and an interactive domestic installation.
The central piece of the exhibition is a large textile work called Know My Name. It is made from woollen squares knitted by inmates at the Adelaide Women’s Prison. The artists at Catherine House individually embroidered onto these squares the names of each woman who has been killed as a result of gendered violence in South Australia during 2024.
The Know My Name cloak with the names of women who have died in SA in 2024 as a result of domestic violence.
There are names such as Lolene, Frances, Mavis, Shirley and Erica – 66 in all so far. Tragically, Claire says she’s fully aware that she and Miranda may need to add more names before the year is out.
“Some of the squares have ‘unnamed’ embroidered on them due to cultural or legal reasons because there is a disproportionate number of Indigenous women on this cloak, which is terrible,” Claire says.
“On the other side we’ve made a screenprint that says ‘Hear my name, know my name, say my name’, and those three things came out of discussion with the women at Catherine House.”
The exhibition also includes a work called What Women Hold featuring paper mâché bowls made from recycled lino prints. Each bowl contains a word or words of significance to the makers, including “grief”, “holding secrets”, “each other”, “stories”, “healing”, “love” and “loss”.
The bowls which feature emotive words that mean something to each artist.
The Experiences of Homelessness exhibit features monoprints made by the women which reflect their homelessness journeys, including bouts of sleeping in cars and tents, couch surfing and, in desperation, living on the streets. The words used in the emotive works include “Invisible”, “No super”, “Mental health” and “Return home to no home”.
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“I think hearing from people with lived experience is really powerful,” Claire says. “And I think giving people an opportunity to actually reflect on their own experiences and their own thoughts about a subject to bring their own insights about something to the fore through creative expression is really powerful; it’s powerful for audiences and it’s powerful for the women involved to see their work up there and to have the opportunity to share it with others.”
But taking part in the exhibition wasn’t for everyone. Some women opted out due to the confronting nature of the discussions around it.
“They would just say, ‘Sorry, I can’t even think about that’, and walk around the garden for a while and then come back later,” Claire says.
‘There were so many awful stories’
“We read about domestic violence, we think we have an understanding of it, but it’s only when you really begin to sit and talk to people that you get a sense of the injustices that still go on. You know that victims are often ignored and blamed for what happened, and you know perpetrators are excused often.
“There were so many awful stories about how many women were being killed. It was bad enough that it was one a week in Australia, but it wasn’t that anymore. There was a time last year in South Australia where there were about four women in one week killed due to male violence. Often the perpetrator was somebody that they knew well. It’s really disturbing.
“This kind of gendered violence is really distressing, because it just doesn’t seem to go away, and the coercive control stuff is just everywhere as well.”
Another part of the exhibition is based around the idea of “What makes us feel safe?”. It features monoprints on card and tissue with words such as “Comfort”, “Belonging”, “Respect” and “Agency”.
A welcoming “kitchen” also forms part of the display with an old-fashioned fridge where visitors can leave hand-written notes about their memories of the kitchen during childhood.
A homely kitchen forms part of the exhibition.
“Some of the notes are beautiful and about lovely times of cooking with Mum, and others are really sad,” Claire says. “I saw one that said, ‘Dad always ate on his own, and he meted out the punishment’.”
Local filmmaker Sophie Alstergren and Claire’s daughter, artist Angelica Harris-Faull, also made two short films, documenting the participants as they gradually created these powerful works of art.
“The exhibition came from a year of Art Bus workshops with women at Catherine House, empowering them to gain confidence, as well as a sense of community and foster friendships,” Claire says. “Women often say the experience of creating art, and learning new creative skills and methods, is both rewarding and healing.
“The women at Catherine House are fantastic, and there’s so much humour, you know; we would sit and drink tea and talk and get to know each other. It’s also really hard work and people are filled with trauma, but I think the process of this exhibition has also been very empowering.”
What Women Hold is showing at the Hawke Centre’s Kerry Packer Civic Gallery at UniSA, located on Level 3 of the Hawke Building, until January 31, 2025.