Trans Baltic-Tasman Crossing (2018)

Video animation by Oliver Clifton, X-ray Vision, of scanned pages of Trans Baltic-Tasman Crossing

This Coptic stitch book is an ode to my ancestral roots in the Baltics and the hold the region still has on my cultural and emotional identity. The work taps into the mythology surrounding the lure of ocean voyages to allude to refugee migrations from the Baltics to the Antipodes in the wake of WWII, that also often entailed an uncertain journey from the known to the unknown. The vintage collage material was sourced during an artist residency at the Estonian Printing and Paper Museum, Tartu, in 2017, and has been supplemented with used business envelopes from my letter box, bridging Australian and Baltic motifs and references.