Five generations back, artist Sera Waters’ firsts European ancestors arrived in Australia in 1838, settling in Adelaide only two years after South Australia had been established. Through textiles and installation, Waters has established a practice engaged in an ethics of care and truth-telling from the context of her settler colonial ancestral lineage. Coming at her work from this angle, Waters recognises the difficult issues of our contested postcolonial present by complicating the story of her own family history in her work.

Waters has developed a strong and dedicated following in South Australia for her contemporary spin on handmade crafts, embroidery, pattern work and textiles. Her profile is set to expand its reach after she was awarded the second Guildhouse Fellowship in 2020, following Troy-Anthony Baylis taking out the inaugural prize last year. The Guildhouse Fellowship was established with the generous support of The James and Diana Ramsay Foundation. Delivered in partnership with the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Fellowship supports exceptional mid-career South Australian artists.

Guildhouse CEO Emma Fey couldn’t be more thrilled by the outcome, saying: “Sera’s work is excellent, nuanced, technically and conceptually intricate, and yet inviting. Arcing from historical evidence to contemporary manifestations, Waters casts light on these seemingly innocuous and unofficial objects as potent reminders of normalised traditions and hierarchies of gender and colonisation”.

Her Fellowship project, titled Future Traditions, will unpack through research and making, age-old human traditions that have been carried along generationally to consider how they can be redirected towards strategies of survival. The much anticipated outcome will be a body of new work to be displayed at the Art Gallery of South Australia at the conclusion of the Fellowship. In the meantime, she is gearing up for her third solo exhibition at Hugo Michell Gallery in August 2021.

Waters belongs to a generation of Australian artists including Julie Gough, Narelle Jubelin, Raquel Ormella and Joan Ross, whose work is deeply engaged in untangling the colonial project in different ways, but often through feminist critiques of history and national identity. In conversation she frequently uses the word ‘knot’ to describe the problems her work speaks to, while acknowledging the irony that an embroiderer avoids knots as much as they can.

“I see myself holding up knots and saying ‘look at this, all these threads and tangles’”, she explains. “I’m not about undoing those knots, but saying our current situation has arisen because of these complex knots and interactions, events and colonising practices that have long threads into the future if we don’t address them.”