Sera Waters

Born in Murray Bridge in 1979, Sera Waters is a South Australian artist, writer and academic currently living in Adelaide. As the descendant of five generations of South Australian settler colonists – her forebears came to Australia from England, Scotland, Ireland and Germany – Waters draws on the narratives of her familial history to redress gaps and silences within Australian history. Working predominantly in textiles, fibres and sculpture, her meticulous skill in hand-embroidery and domestic hand-crafts was propelled by an opportunity to study Western European stitching techniques at the Royal School of Needlework in England, in 2006. Waters returned to Adelaide armed with the material vocabulary of her matrilineal ancestors – the skills her great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother would have regularly practised – as a means to examine “the threads that have been inherited from the past, to intentionally reset their course.”[1]

Waters often uses found or second-hand textiles to create her work. Over the past fifteen years, she has produced large sculptural installations to small intimate portraits using a wide range of materials, from op shop tea towels to her grandmother’s bedsheets, even using materials as unlikely as kangaroo skins. In repurposing used and vintage textiles, her practice emphasises “the marks and enrichment of age, wear and life… I’m trying to carry history along in the materials.” Her highly detailed and laborious hand-craft processes also draw attention to the medium of time; “the time I spend with every little piece of fabric and every stitch is to really think about the past and how it operates in the present.” [3]

[1] Sera Waters quoted by Miram Kelly, “Sera Waters: Domestic Arts,” Artlink, 1 December, 2017, [2] Sera Waters quoted by Sheridan Hart, “Sera Waters unpicks the long stitches of Australian history,”Art Guide Australia, 3 October, 2018, [3] Sera Waters, “Sera Water’s ghostly embroideries,” Radio National, Streamed audio, 12 July, 2017, 8:20,

For Free/State, the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Waters has produced her most sizeable installation to date. Storied Sail Cloth (2022) features five large sails made from vintage linen and hemp, whose surfaces have been intricately worked back into with montaged scenes of ecological crisis, ghostly portraits and fragments of topological maps. Each sail is bestowed with its own subtitle – Ketches,Drainage, Mine, Seeding and Pugholes. These titles summon Waters’ ancestral connections to the pioneering industries of South Australia – land clearing, agriculture, farming and mining – whose environmental consequences we continue to grapple with today. Her use of the sail motif is similarly driven by another historical kinship, in this instance with the McKay family. Arriving in Port Adelaide in 1838, to establish a sail-making business, the McKay family owned the Annie Watt, a prime example of a late nineteenth-century ketch – a two-masted sail boat – that was integral to the pastoral development of the Spencer Gulf. “Truth-telling is the most vital force toward decolonisation – and I come at that through my own family historical entanglements, telling their pasts in order to learn from them.”[4]

For Waters, the symbolism of the sail is complex and contradictory. It is deeply connected to a colonial history of land grab and the instigating acts of Aboriginal dispossession; it is a harbinger of change and destruction. From a twenty-first century perspective, the sail is also an emblem of hope – sailing towards new horizons, a new and better future. Waters hand-skills, rather ironically, may be a method for future-proofing, particularly against a background of increasing collective ecological and social crises. “I am interested in what traditions might need to come back. This is a chance to put hand-crafted embroidery and textile techniques, like soon to be lost sail-making techniques, in a contemporary context in order to bring back their value.”[5]

[4] Email correspondence with the Art Gallery of South Australia, 2022.

[5] Ibid.