PICA celebrated International Women’s Day 2025 with curator-led tours of two exhibitions. Curator Annika Kristensen presented an introduction to Oui Move In You by Turner Prize-winning artist Laure Prouvost, followed by PICA CEO Hannah Mathews who led a tour of In Her Footsteps: A Tribute to Matrilineal Legacy, a group exhibition honouring the influence of women across generations.

[Hannah Mathews] So as Annika mentioned before there was a book that ACCA published with Laure, which comprised hundreds of artists responding to this idea of matriarchs and matrilineal influences. That book was a real inspiration for thinking about what would happen upstairs in our West End Gallery during the Perth Festival. As I said, we like to use the Festival opportunity, with lots of visitors to the arts and culture in Perth, to connect Western Australian artists with their colleagues across the country and across the globe. And so the exhibition we have here called In Her Footsteps: A Tribute to Matrilineal Legacy is a group exhibition that brings together 7 artists who are thinking about the women that came before them, the women who have influenced them – it might be aunties, mothers, grandmothers. It might be chosen, aunties, chosen mothers and chosen sisters. It might be female artists who have influenced, it might be ancestors and forbearers.

So we begin here in the exhibition. When I began planning this show I was thinking about what is the most important female story to tell about this place, where PICA is based. This place prior to the building’s arrival on what was a gathering space for First Nations people across the state. And so thinking about the ancestor story, the most appropriate place to begin was the story and the life of Fanny Balbuk. So Fanny Yureel Balbuk who was a Noongar ancestor, 9 husbands, no children. She was born on Heirisson Island. The work that we’re in is these three textile pieces and the lino pieces behind me were made by Noongar artist, Zali Morgan, who also works as a curator. This is a series of works Zali made about Fanny when she was studying at Curtin University. And what’s really important about them is they bring visibility and attention to Fanny’s story. Fanny walked her bidi line, her song line every day and continued to do that every day even as the structures of colonisation came up here in Boorloo/Perth. On these three textiles, we begin with Yandilup – the wetlands that existed before Perth city was founded and colonised. And these red lines on the textiles are Fanny’s bidi lines and the line that she walked. Slowly Perth became known as it is today and land was reclaimed and sand bridges were removed and the city was built and gridded. These textile works track this place over periods of time. This one is more a macro view of Perth, you can see the Derbal Yerrigan, you can see the wetlands that still exist as Perth is formed, but you can also see that Fanny’s bidi line continues through those spaces. There many fabulous stories about Fanny, but one I love the most is that her resilience, her persistence, her connection to country meant that she would open the gates of white picket homes, open the front doors, walk through houses, walk through backyards, go over fences, and just keep walking and keep that connection to her Country, to her bidi, in the face of colonisation.

That female story is the first story of this place that I think is really important to acknowledge and celebrate today. And thinking about Zali, who’s a young woman doing a lot of work in terms of cultural connection and sharing of cultural knowledge – lots of responsibility on her shoulders – this is a very important work for her to have made . The In her Footsteps…. exhibition really begins here with Fanny’s work and Fanny’s story.

You’ll have that opportunity to look closer at the linocuts behind me, but there are images of specific architectures of colonised places. Colonies generally begins with schools, prisons and courts, sometimes libraries, if you’re lucky. But as you move through, it goes from Government House, which is actually a Noongar burial site. And you end up at Yandilup, which is where we are now, a government school building that’s now PICA. Next we have a series of paintings from the artist Darcey Bella Arnold, who’s based in Melbourne. Darcey was over here with her two year old toddler for the installation and opening of the exhibition. Darcey’s such an interesting painter. Her relationship with her mother is also a point of connection with this exhibition. Darcey’s mother was having treatment for a serious illness when she developed encephalitis and as a result an acquired brain injury which saw her lose her long-term memory. So since 2004 she has lived with the aphasia. She’s married. She has four children. And every day it’s like reconnecting with this new family. The four kids and her husband have cared for her. She’s fully functioning, she just doesn’t have that memory recollection. So Darcey’s mum was an English teacher. She had high school French. As Jennifer moved through the early anxiety of this experience she began writing, and writing profusely. As an English teacher that was quite familiar to her. But she started also writing this hybridised kind of English-French which we can see here. It’s a very beautiful hybrid language she started creating. You can kind of recognise it phonetically. But it’s not the English we’re taught in school. Here Darcey is thinking about language and utterances, and how this is the way we share things, communicate about things, how we recollect things, how our memories come out of our mouths, not always complete. Maybe the things we say aren’t always true or literal about what they’re representing. Darcey’s made these textural portraits of her mother. It’s a pretty extraordinary story.

Next on the right is a collection of four works by Tom Freeman who is an artist based down in Fremantle. Tom is someone whose practise I was aware of, when I think of their work I think about the joy and curiosity of making, making a lot with their partner, making a lot with their kids. And so when we started thinking about this exhibition and thinking about not just female connections, but also male connections and other connections to women and influential matriarchs, I went to Tom and said we’re going to do this show – is it something you’d interested in thinking about in terms of your practice? And he said actually I have had these works for like fifteen years about my mum. I’ve never known quite what context in which to share them with other people. This is the perfect, perfect opportunity. And so the four works here are really representations, reflections, sharing’s of Tom’s relationship and memories and celebration and homage to his mother, who’s still alive, and who was here with us on opening and the opening weekend. The collection is of fragments, because in thinking about your relationship with people it’s often through imagery, through language, through experiences. The work that’s coming out from the wall is actually a collation of five or six sketches on tracing paper that Tom made of a black and white photograph of his mum in the 1970s. The work collates these various portraits/images of the same person – suggesting multiple angles, perspectives, moments. And then 40 years later, a portrait, a sketch taken from those photos and collated. Next to it is a painting on a board. The background depicts the house that Tom believes his mother was born in in England and her actual birth. And then the textual piece here is an account written by Tom’s sister of her own birth, which took place up in Broome. So there’s this first, second, third hand renderings of their mother through both siblings. Then the larger painting is something that Tom has been doing for a while, but I guess in the context of this exhibition, the way we started thinking and talking about it, was thinking about the present, thinking about the kind of concrete material, stable nature of the present which we are all in now, and then things move forward they present becomes the past and a single moment, once static, casts a trace of its past. From the solid concrete stability of the present, as soon as you step into the future, things becoming more fluid, things changing. This painting is literally just these moments actually going backwards in time. I actually think about how all of these works are quite an emotive and poetic homage to his mum.

Behind me, is an artist originally from Darwin, now loving in Melbourne. When I was thinking about this exhibition I was also thinking about female artistic influences. And Lauren Burrow has long been interested in the life and work of Val Plumwood. Val Plumwood was an early ecofeminist. Like Fanny Bulbek, she was someone who forged her own path, new ground, go places to defend their connections to things, their understandings of things. Val Plumwood is quite interesting. She wrote a lot about environmental accountability, and is also the survivor of crocodile attack up in Darwin. Lauren’s quite interested in this piece of writing that Val produced about surviving this crocodile attack because she describes this experience as this ultimate point of transformation for her, as someone who had written about environmental philosophy for a long time, in the death throes of the crocodile’s roll, truly realising, very profoundly for the first time, that as a human being she is not separate or in a hierarchy to all these other types of food or environments or waters or biology or floras or faunas. In this work Lauren has contend with the significance of the crocodile’s roll for Val and connected it to the centrifugal force used in sculptural casting. You might have noticed downstairs there’s a 10-speed bike attached to the insides of a washing machine. That component is connected to Lauren’s work here. Lauren brought these elements over to Perth from Melbourne and purchased some local beeswax, heated up the beeswax, poured it inside a mould inside the washing machine and got on the bike and pedalled, causing the centrifugal motion to cast these items. She’s then taken the outside of the washing machine, cut it in half, and used the outer layer as a way of projecting photographs that she’s taken of Val Plumwood’s archive. Like Tom, this approach to first and second iterations of memories and lives and influences and always thinking quite holistically about the practice and how to use materials is also evident.

Behind us over here is Sarah Elson who is also a local artist living near Fremantle. When I first met Sarah 20 years ago she was having children, she was really focused on this maternal phase of her life, which connects strongly to what’s happening downstairs in Laure’s exhibition. 20 years later, she’s contending with her body as a post-menopausal body and so this collection of works here is a continuation of her work with metal and metal smithing. But it’s quite focused on seeds and pods and casings that she has collected from the ground once they’re spent. Sarah then she takes them home and in her studio, she uses the metals that she has in her home, whether it be one or two cent pieces that she’s melted down to make this cloak, or whether it be jewellery from failed relationships that she has melted and recycled and made into this headpiece. If you get up close you’ll recognise many of the casings that you probably used to play with as children. But essentially Sarah’s thinking about a long relationship with the female body and the notions of fertility and productivity. What happens once those societal expectations of women’s bodies have passed? Her work is absolutely a celebration of women’s resilience, and the many great things they go on to do. More recently Sarah has been making works to be performed in other people’s work. This headpiece is worn on the head, and it’s got a long tail that comes down to a sharp spike at the end – a sting. It’s contesting this warm, fuzzy, soft notion of woman, that’s actually this raw, strong, resilient and powerful thing. The last two works in the exhibition are from a mother and child: Kate Harding and her child, D. Kate has made this quilt and D has contributed two works on paper. Both artists matrilineal country is Carnarvon Gorge, up in Queensland. We’ve worked together for some time now. D is a well established First Nations artists, known nationally and internationally for the innovation with materials and cultural connection. D works with materials from Country, but also synthetic materials that represent early colonisation. They have a painting practice and a sculptural practice. They’re committed to establishing an understanding, appreciation and valuing of Indigenous modernisms that sit alongside and part of the Western canon. When they had a solo exhibition in Melbourne in early Covid D said to me, I really want to invite my mum to make part of the work in this exhibition. It’s a major museum survey. But my mum taught me so much of what I know. And actually, she’s been working as an artist for the last 20 years, but she’s only been calling herself one maybe for the last five or so years. And that’s just because she’s seen me do it. Kate taught D how to quilt, how to embroider, how to knit, metalwork, leatherwork – all priceless skills that have come from Kate. And so what we did as part of that exhibition was to support Kate to go out on Country, with a women’s circle, gathering materials, doing some dyeing and creating a series of quilts that are very specific to her and her mother and great grandmother’s story of Carnarvon Gorge. As part of the exhibition D also wanted to bring into the exhibition the quilts that Kate had made for them when D was born, at ten year’s of age and then at 40, all special occasions. The quilt exhibition here is the 10 year old quilt which has warm tones and use the log cabin pattern which is very specific to a Western European tradition as a key part of its construction. We’re basically bringing these two artists together to acknowledge that relationship – that familial and cultural relationship, that intergenerational relationship, the sharing of skills, the shoulders that we stand on. So I encourage you to have a wander. It’s a small show but it’s a rich show, filled with lots of stories, relationships, pathways and connections.

Image: D Harding and Kate Harding, installation view, In Her Footsteps, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2025. Photo: Rebecca Mansell. Image Zali Morgan, Boorloo Bidi 2023, installation view, In Her Footsteps,Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2025. Photo: Rebecca Mansell. Image: D Harding, an Amish “Log Cabin”… 2023, In Her Footsteps, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2025. Photo: Rebecca Mansell. Image: Tom Freeman, installation view, In Her Footsteps, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2025. Photo: Rebecca Mansell. Image: Lauren Burrow, Pressure on the rim of surface running over it 2025, In Her Footsteps, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2025. Photo: Rebecca Mansell. Image: Lauren Burrow, Pressure on the rim of surface running over it 2025, In Her Footsteps, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2025. Photo: Rebecca Mansell. Image: Sarah Elson, installation view,In Her Footsteps,Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2025. Photo: Rebecca Mansell.