Historical information

Juanita McLauchlan draws upon her Gamilaraay identity, history, and language to explore family connections, personal belongings, and body adornment. McLauchlan employs both printmaking and fibre-based practices to reflect her spiritual connection to Country and her cultural identity as an Aboriginal woman with English lineage. Her work considers how gathering and sharing ancestral knowledge preserves intergenerational ties, bridging past, present, and future. McLauchlan creates contact prints on blankets, capturing impressions of Wiradjuri Country in Wagga Wagga, NSW, where she currently lives and works. McLauchlan was born on her Grandmother’s Country, Gamilaraay Country, and has lived in many places across Australia before spending the last 20 years with her family in Wagga Wagga.

McLauchlan says of this artwork:

By compulsion to make and move my hands I combine my mixed crossed cultural heritage, using woollen blankets and possum skin to create necklaces that are soft and beautiful, begging to be worn and handled as a way to recognise and pay homage to those who have come before me.

These body adornments/necklaces are the embodiment of the history that I carry on my shoulders, of who I am and finding the comfort of where I fit into this forever changing life. They are like a generational hug of confidence and warmth once they are placed over your head. Stories of my childhood come to mind when making each necklace.
Guuma-li / gathering, is a time when my sister and I were staying with my grandmother, and she was called to deal with a snake next door. Even though the snake was longer than she was tall, it was no match for our grandmother. The snake is in the main necklace as an ode to our grandmother and the strengths she has passed to us.

The woollen blankets have been contact printed with bush dyes and bound in red thread creating links that form an ethereal shape wrapped and held together with the possum skin.”