Niki McDonald uses tools and techniques traditionally relegated to the domestic realm to pose questions about the contemporary status of women. In her work, ‘The Pillars’, stitching time is thinking time. Here, McDonald has assembled an anonymous line-up of seemingly compliant women to question the status of labour, colonisation and the occupied land from which the colonising nation has prospered. Frayed edges risk the work becoming unstitched, exposed. Unworked sections of the canvas demonstrate that the picture is incomplete. The women stand strong like painted wheat silos, emblems of industry. The remnants of their labour simultaneously reveal and conceal the mechanisms of social, cultural and agricultural production.
Tapestry Girl 