Gladys interview with Sia Cox
In June 2011, a mate and I were holidaying in Mparntwe /Alice Springs and looking around the industrial area when we met Sia Cox gallery sitting her exhibition of soft sculptural characters. We stayed a while because it was fun hearing about her work and because we were all 6ft women and sparking over that. I took the above photo for an artist friend back home who was making masks at the time.
Four years later I was living in Tennant Creek on Waramungu country (500km north of Alice Springs) and Sia passed through town, stopping by my work to spruik a program in her role for a tertiary arts institution. I’d remembered her work as textile artist and not long after invited her to work on a project supporting women in Kulumindini who wanted to revive their remote textile-printing studio with a screen-printing project. Then in 2016 in Western Australia, I was working with a Noongar women’s craft group who were seeking a facilitator with a variety of textile skills for a craft storytelling project, so I called Sia up again.
She is a gem of an art facilitator with a true knack for getting people to consider the skills they already hold in their own hands, what stories they hold in their hearts, and what has been handed down to them. She’s supported women to use their domestic craft skills to express personal and cultural stories as art and facilitated craft circles - everyone weaving, stitching, printing together so that stories can spill out and a group can inspire and support each others’ work. There are many people who would never have considered that they too could make art had they not met Sia Cox (myself included).
There’s a passion for stories and an approach to making for the sheer pleasure of it that beams from Sia’s own art practice. Her textile and sculptural works rarely just sit in a traditional gallery setting, often working their way to engage with others through performance or as a tool within community rituals. In her 2014 exhibition Cleopatra’s Dress (first shown at Watch this Space gallery), she resurrected her great great-grandmother’s silk screens and skirt patterns and then invited a local dance group to devise and perform a work in the skirts at the launch that nodded to the Greek heritage of the designs. These skirts later appeared in Craig San Roque’s Persephone’s Dog performance at sunset at the Old Ilparpa Quarry, danced in by Sia herself and other women. For Soften and Expand, these new works were recently hung around her lounge as part of her Mother Blessing ceremony where she shared the stories behind the pieces works with close friends and family - a starting point for others to share their own stories.
I’ve asked her if she approaches her own art from a community development or place-making framework or sees her work as socially engaged art. She jokes that it is her way of making friends in a new town (good to be honest), and is driven by moments of human connection through art and social impact, such as community coming together at an art show and celebrating a shared sense of place.
In Soften and Expand, there’s a continuation to her resourceful process of drawing on what came before and what is at hand; in the skill, the materials and, importantly, the birth story passed down and passed on to give courage to others. Parenthood is now the place or state that she both navigates and invites others into, drawing on her new community in Newcastle and the strength of women in her family birthing before her (and her own first birthing experience!) and offers it to her audience in the form of these luscious, softly framed and generous openings to her world.
It’s been wonderful to hear Sia’s stories while she made the works for her Gladys show, so here’s an interview with Sia for you to enjoy.
- JW
Sia! How did you first arrive at soft sculpture?
I loved learning to work with traditional sculptural materials and techniques at the National Art School, but in third year as I was trying to find an authentic voice of my own, I realised how much more I was enjoying making a doll for a friend’s baby than my actual art practice. That was a light bulb moment. I went home in those last holidays before graduation and made a soft sculpture of a birthing woman. The scale was only limited by the room I was working in, so it was big. I’d always been in awe of childbirth and at the time I was thinking of it as a metaphor for the struggle and reward of art making. Applying sculptural principals to hand-sewing skills felt like a way of making the rather masculine world of sculpture my own. It felt like I’d found the right language to tell my stories. And it was fun.
Living in various places across Australia, you’ve often created bodies of work that share stories of that place and community. Can you speak to soft sculpture as a medium for telling stories of place?
After art school I moved to Kintore, 500km west of Alice Springs.
Something that impacted my practice was noticing how fabrics left outside would disintegrate in the sun, if not be eaten up by the sand. I loved shaping those fragments of fabric that had already been transformed by place, into stories of place.
I guess as a recently arrived east coast migrant I found a lot about the desert harsh. And at the same time very intriguing and beautiful. In making soft sculptures of people and places I tried to soften myself to the desert and imagine being comfortable there.
I like making sculptures with fabrics that hold stories that relate to the subject. In ‘Palm Tree: Anastasia’ for example, the dark green is from some well-fitting, high waisted made-in-Melbourne jeans I loved. The tightening of these jeans was one of the first signs I noticed that I was pregnant the first time. The sky is raw silk that I collected in Alice Springs and dyed at a workshop years later in Newcastle after becoming a mum where I relished the time to spend a whole day learning a new creative technique. So the work is about my transition to motherhood and the fabrics I’ve used span that time period.
The ‘Portal’ series of sculptures in Soften and Expand are as much about an arrival in a new place and in your identity as a parent. There is so much in these sculptures that visually speak to birth and, well, joy. Please tell us more!
The title of the show, ‘Soften and Expand’ was a mantra for birthing that stuck with me, and turns out it's what parenting has required too.
My joy in parenting expands when I’m making art. I guess I’m inhabiting and taking pleasure in more of myself so I have more to share with my son. Friends recently gave me a Leunig poem, I’ll have to check the exact wording, something like, ‘a mother’s own soul will be her most difficult birth and the dearest playmate to her other children.’ Oh! I loved it!
What about the materials woven into the sculptures? Is there a story behind the chosen fabrics?
The fabrics all hold good memories. The glittery multicolour lycra comes from a pair of vintage cozzies a friend gave me for my 21st birthday. The sparkly gold was from when I made a bodice for another friend’s wedding, the faded grey was a favourite cotton sun shirt that I wore through my years in the desert, other golds and teals come from my sister’s design projects and some are printed with our great grandmother’s screen prints.
So the readers know, I am asking you these questions just before your second baby is due. Was creating the Birth Tree series in the exhibition as much a meditation on your nearing labour as a reflection on the birth of your first child?
For me, birth was an incredibly other worldly experience which was quickly followed by all-consuming baby care, and so it’s taken a few years before I’ve had time to really process what happened. Making this work has been part of my journey to investigate my first birth and integrate it into my identity. Having made this work makes me feel like my soul has caught up and I am ready to step into the next birth, like you said, any day now.
Why the trees? And are the stories about your mother and great-great grandmother birthing their children that accompany the works ones you have known for a while or were there family conversations in the process?
The birth tree series was initially inspired by Aboriginal birthing trees in Victoria on Djab Warrung country, trees cultivated to have a hollow centre that provides shelter where Aboriginal people have birthed for 50 generations. The image of entering a tree as one person and emerging as two, the same tree where your ancestors had birthed before you, is such an incredibly powerful image. Traditional owners have now been fighting to protect these trees from a new highway development since 2018. This led me to thinking about my own ancestors’ birth stories
I’ve always known birth stories of family to the level you tell kids, but through making this work I’ve learnt a lot more. My Mum is an artist too so I’m always showing her what I’m making. We talk about the work and the story and the meaning, and our conversations around birthing get deeper. The amount of time it's taken to make the work for this show has provided a framework for a conversation to unfold over months, with plenty of imagery to bounce around with.
Thanks Sia!