Wagga Quilts

Camilla Ker

Exhibition Dates:
Friday April 3 – Friday April 25
Monday – Friday: 9:00am – 5:00pm
WEEKENDS CLOSED

A contemporary reworking of the Australian Wagga quilt using salvaged textiles.

These quilts draw on the Australian tradition of Wagga quilts—improvised bedcovers historically made by rural women from whatever materials were available: wool offcuts, worn clothing, flour sacks, and other remnants of domestic life. Born from necessity, Wagga quilts transformed discarded materials into objects of warmth and care.

Reimagining this tradition for the present day, the works in this exhibition are constructed from discarded clothing and gleaned fabrics gathered through everyday life. Like their historical counterparts, these quilts value resourcefulness and tenderness, proposing softness and reuse as a response to disposability.

The exhibition also draws on the tradition of Victorian diary and memory quilts, which recorded personal histories through fabric using embroidered names, dates, and symbolic imagery. In Tasmania, historic works such as the Westbury Quilt, created in Westbury in the mid-19th century, similarly demonstrate quilting as a form of social record, preserving relationships and community histories through stitched contributions.

Bringing these traditions together, the quilts extend historical practices of reuse. Made from everyday materials, they hold traces of lived experience while transforming discarded textiles into objects of comfort.