Topologies of practice: Reconsidering the legacy of Western Australian textile artist Elsje Van Kepple

I work in the spaces between the disciplines of history, landscape andvisual narratives, testing storytelling through form and materiality shapedby the past and the present. My research is also influenced by the worksof makers who sail out on the dangerous sea of fine art with crafted formsas Grayson Perry says, making works unrecognisable to previousgenerations who understood craft to be sturdy, everyday objects and expected art to be otherwise. This paper concerns my research and the visual narratives of other Australian makers – Nalda Searles and Elsje Van Kepple amongst others, whose works test methodologies located in traditional craft practices and fine art which explore particularly Australian relationships to and dialogues with landscape and country. These narratives are informed by fraught histories that continue to infect the present and are expressed through fragility, erasure, accretion and dissipation toward open visual narrative forms that point to many things most especially to the unseen energies and sounds of country and the fragile building blocks and logic of complex fluid ecologies. Their works and my own will be further considered in relation to contemporary feminist models of post-humanist performativity by theorists such as Karen Barad and others.