IN the recent exhibition darn, Barkindji artist Krystle Evans sewed together a spooky realm of girly matriarchs.
They collude and collide on their various contemporary missions of creation.
This was the first exhibition in Slag Heap Projects’ 2025 program which ran from April 17 to May 17.
Evans has familial ties to Far Western New South Wales and since returning to Broken Hill five years ago has won a Maari Ma Indigenous Art Award for her textile and soft sculpture works.
Slag Heap, founded in 2024 by Hester Lyon, Asma d. Mather and Verity Nunan, uses art as a tool to inquire into the complex cultural frictions that underpin, or more accurately, undermine, Broken Hill’s identity.
Evans’ use of reclaimed materials fits this gallery’s home grown and DIY ethos.
The exhibition title darn suggests mending, making do and maternal care. Through the act of stitching, Evans imbues forgotten fabrics, threads and other cast-offs with a new life.
Her works are explicitly feminine, yet there is a sharp, almost sinister energy expressed in her characters.
It’s nanna-chic with a hard edge. These characters hint at Aboriginal stories and ceremonies, and just like Evans’ purposeful stitching, they are soft yet chaotic, personal yet powerful.
Sis #1 and Sis #2 exemplify a maternal force you do not want to mess with.
A wool blanket, both warm and prickly, is the background on which Sis #1 bares her teeth, her floral fabric hair and delicate doily skirt neatly arranged as she leers at viewers.
On the facing wall Sis #2, also with arms outstretched beyond the edges of a wool blanket, bares her teeth, her eyes composed of mismatching embroidery. Markers of femininity are repeated and then subsumed into new, otherworldly narratives.
The most obvious are the bare breasts and dark skin of anthropological depictions of Aboriginal women and rock art creator beings.
Your enduring curiosity (2025), for example, is a hand quilted figure, hemmed with pink bailing twine, her breasts tipped with pink buttons.
There is a playful, unfocused quality to this character, she’s fully formed with her own agenda.
Humour is an important part of Evans’ approach to what are contentious themes and topics.
Undomesticated female, sex and femininity (2025) is what you get when the unruly spirit being defies the angry grandma spirits (Sis #1 and Sis #2). She takes her leopard print dilly bag and curls her yellow, binder-twine locks, and heads to town.
Evans imbues this character with a whimsy which balances some of the more serious matriarchs in the show. Here orange quandong seeds are nipples, adorning patterned fabric breasts.
A little red embroidered smile says she is off to have some fun.
The exhibition is centred around a wrought iron bed, child size with a simple black frame.
Three plush toy-like spirits hover over the bed.
They are like a plushie version of a Wandjina spirit.
A fourth spirit rests on the pillow, their presence at the head of the bed connecting the everyday act of sleep with the intangible spirit realm.
Where do we go while we sleep? Do these beings watch over us as we journey in dreamland?
Where is the child whose bed is watched over by these spirits?
Rather than a child’s room, perhaps I have walked into the spirit’s bedroom, and it is the child who is imaginary.
Either way, maternal forces – some benevolent and some dangerous – surround this bed, all the characters in the exhibition literally watching over it. Evans is a master of found fabric.
Pattern and line have been used skilfully here, nothing is overused or risks becoming decorative, it is all in service of creating these spirit-beings and their unwieldy almost scathing energy. I am intrigued by what Evans will do next.
There is a sense among these dense characters, of a quirky, very likely vengeful, force waiting to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting and highly deserving public.
The next event presented by Slag Heap Projects, in collaboration with the Old Vic Gallery Studio and Premier Automotive Tyres, Marnpi Festival, will display works by Badger Bates and Anthony Hayward, opening on Saturday, August 2.
