Natasha Narain and Karen Milder

…

The title invites viewers to explore the complexities of creative friendships between women, foregrounding shared experiences, reflections, and materials across time and space. This expansive interpretation of an artist’s book deploys feminine and non-traditional materials to form a composite and portable installation centred on repetition and visual-textual interplay.

Where interwoven lines, words, and colours combine with found objects—bags, a silken wrap, a non-chronological photo album, a handmade canvas book, and painted cardboard referencing a symbiotic relationship formed when exhibiting WOMB at Gasworks, Melbourne (2013).

A collaboration that has continued through drawing, sewing, collage, collecting, juxtaposing, writing and exchanging works in jubilant open-ended play, even when living in distant places.

By choosing to carefully encase their works inside a repurposed wicker box, Karen and Natasha find a portable solution that seemingly protects their memories and materials amidst movement and disruptions, but ultimately conveys fragility and the layered nature of artistic collaboration.