Sienna Barton – 'Urn, The Heirloom', 2024

The Heirloom Urn serves as a departure from Sienna's usual basket-making practice, by incorporating beads. Sitting atop this hand-woven form, thousands of clear and metallic beads almost look like lichen forming on an ancient sculpture. When shone at with a bright light (like the flash of a camera), the beads appear completely transparent, revealing the colours underneath. Spanning hundreds of hours of work, this piece seeks to interrogate the preciousness of "women's work" and the value of the handmade in a world where so much is automated or artificial (including intelligence).

This is a treasured piece, to be passed down to the people you love.

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Sienna Barton is a Naarm-based painter and textile artist. Freshly graduating from the MFA program at RMIT University, her artistic practice is obsessive and time-consuming. Often serving as a means of soothing fidgety fingers, her work seeks to transform anxious energy into tangible works of art. She’s currently focusing on craft as a radical act of self-care, while trying to understand her relationship to colour: why pink features so prolifically and why red makes her cringe. Her textile works utilise discarded materials from local clothing labels and her own wardrobe, while others are collected by her grandparents during their weekly trips to the op shop. It’s a true labour of love, and each thread has an embodied history.

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Material: collected and discarded fabrics, new and vintage threads, shredded
paintbrush rags, collected and new beads. Spanning hundreds of hours of work. 

Dimensions: approx. 29 x 25cm