Whenever I go on a trip to the beach, I bring a textile scrap to soak in the sea terminus. This weekend we went to Merimbula, located on the Far South Coast or Sapphire Coast of New South Wales. There, we frequent Main Beach, where whales can be sighted offshore headed south to Antarctica with their young.
Living in a land-locked city, a trip to the sea is an occasion. We travel through the flatlands, down Brown Mountain to meet the shore - about a 3 hr drive. The water was choppy in the bay, I rolled my jeans to submerge my peice of cloth in the foam, a process photographed by my partner. Soon after, I stitched the scrap down (still salty and damp) onto a new white ground for a project titled Gain. This project is about making space for explorative and diaristic making, a large-scale hanging populated with memory and occupation. Textiles are very much a part of memory making, and this cloth will always remind me of our trips to the bay.