By Casey Neill
More than 1000 people helped craft, culture and community to shine in Greater Dandenong throughout August.
Cultural Threads linked about 25 artists with community members to forge connections, trade skills, share stories and interweave cultures.
Together they produced nine intricate and colourful installations that have adorned the municipality over the past month.
Artist Emma Anna created a giant Community Peace Quilt with help from school children and other residents.
It’s on display at Dandenong Library and will remain in place until the International Day of Peace, sometimes unofficially known as World Peace Day, which is observed annually on 21 September.
Emma used pieces of the dresses, shirts and skirts she discarded when she moved to tropical Colombia from Melbourne five years ago.
She helped people to create hexagonal, flower-shaped pieces during sewing workshops and joined them together to create the quilt.
Emma said the quilt was a collection of personal narratives.
The City of Greater Dandenong hosted Cultural Threads, which was a key satellite event of Craft Victoria’s Craft Cubed Festival and was previously held in 2014.
Across the project, workshop participants included Burmese and Tamil women’s groups, Noble Park Country Women’s Association, Greater Dandenong Social Knitwork, the Springvale Heights, Springvale Rise, Yarraman Oaks, St Anthony’s and Dandenong primary schools, The Open Door, Dandenong Market, and South East Community Links.
Some of Victoria’s most celebrated artists, including Adrienne Kneebone, Chili Philly and Rachel Wood, led textile workshops in weaving, crocheting, cross stitch, sewing and macrame.
Community members and artists attended a launch for Cultural Threads at Dandenong’s Heritage Hill Museum and Historical Gardens on Thursday 28 July.
Cultural Threads also included four-textile themed exhibitions, one by master craftsman tapestry weaver Tim Gresham.
The Journal caught up with several Cultural Threads artists.
Sayra Lothian said that her project, Greater Dandenong Patterns, emerged from strolling around suburbia.
She captured tiny aspects of architecture in embroidery and left the framed fragments on streets for people to find and take home.
Community installation artists Margaret Summerton and Robina Summers joined forces to bring the Tree of Life into being.
The white tree was bursting with flowers and butterflies and a growing collection of wishes from Harmony Square visitors.
Olinda artist Anzara Clarke produced Making Culture with about seven teenage girls at South East Community Links in Springvale.
Their colourful paper clothing explored culture in at Dandenong Library.
“It might be their own personal culture, in terms of their history and tradition, or it might be music culture, it might be youth culture,” Anzara said.
Artist Kristin McFarlane’s Here and Now brought together about 100 separate glass etchings in a large installation at the Drum Theatre.
The glass panels reflected cultures from around the world.
With community help Thea Jones created embroidery that hung between Heritage Hill’s fig trees, titled All Her Thoughts Are So Tactile.
It related to Laurel Lodge’s history as a girls’ school.
