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Artbank has invited artist Salote Tawale to explore the Artbank collection through the window gallery. Born in Suva, Fiji Islands and growing up in Melbourne,Tawale’s research practice focuses on cultural identity. She works across video, performance, sculpture and installation, using readily available materials such as calico, acrylic paint and nylon rope as simple urban substitutes for traditional materials. This material focus echoes the feelings of living in the diaspora from cultural customs due to migration and the ongoing effect this has on the way cultural knowledge is received and negotiated.
Tawale’s series of large ‘masi’ paintings acquired by Artbank in 2019 are inspired by traditional Fijian bark cloths. The striking black, white and magenta palette and garlands of shells reference the matrilineal history of the Pacific Islands, and where she fits in that lineage.
We are surrounded by oceans, uses the Artbank collection as a vessel to traverse memory, embodied experience and personal histories, understanding the collection as an ongoing conversation between artist, archive and audience.
Tawale holds an undergraduate degree in Media Arts and a Master of Art from RMIT University, Melbourne, as well as a Master of Fine Art from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in state and national collections around Australia including Artbank. She Tawale is a Lecturer in Screen Arts and the BFA at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.
Featured artists: Benjamin Akuila, Mia Boe, Mark Maurangi Carrol, Michelle Coleman, Karla Dickens, Ken Done, Scott Duncan, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Helen Ganalmirriwuy Garrawurra, Ryan Presley, Kim Wandin, Paul Wood, Talia Smith, Jimmy John Thaiday.
We are surrounded by oceans curated by Salote Tawale
This exhibition finds its basis in my own personal connections to images and objects and water. I explore the role that form, texture and colour play in our feelings of nostalgia and how these become entry points into a wider set of relationships between place, memory, and the things that we share. The works gathered here move between futurity, remembering, and loss. They reflect on the ways archives are formed not only by collectors but equally by makers: a shared space where personal histories are held, preserved, and sometimes contested. In this exhibition, the archive becomes an ongoing conversation, one shaped by the traces we keep and the stories we inherit or reconstruct. Through personal memories and embodied experiences, the exhibition considers how water connects us—whether through genealogies, migrations, or the shared environmental futures we must navigate together. The ocean is not a boundary but a thread that links us, reminding us that our stories are braided across distance and time.
