Grace Lillian Lee
Grace Lillian Lee’s extraordinary practice melds fashion design and art with a body of work that speaks to putting First Nations first, using collaboration as means of achieving reconciliation.
Image credit: Grace Lillian Lee, Future Woven Floral Forms (Black) 4, 2020, canvas, cotton webbing, cane, feathers. Courtesy the artist
Grace Lillian Lee’s Exposed Resilience at STATION Gallery is an edgy and inspiring collection of garments. In black fabric, in white fabric, it ingeniously works with the unique ‘grasshopper’ weaving technique to fuse the ancient Torres
Strait craft with the millennial market
of catwalk fashion.
For this gentle and indomitable designer, the experience of successfully creating wearable art segues to sculptural forms and evokes a special sense of time and place. “I think that what First Nations Fashion + Design (FNFD) stands for is legacy, sustainability, long-term pathways of education, sharing stories, growing our industry and becoming stronger as a nation.”
Inspired by a photo of her grandmother’s wedding on Thursday Island, Lee embraced the ancient weaving technique unique to the Far North Queensland region and set about making each piece by hand, the desirable body adornments bespoke designs.
Future Woven Floral Forms – made of canvas, cotton webbing, cane and feathers – illuminated STATION Gallery, connecting ancient and contemporary narratives. In the words of STATION’s director Jane Hayman, they create “a palpable sense of both bodily presence and bodily absence … the works, suspended at an elevated height, required a lifted gaze, as if the bodies that once inhabited them have ascended.”
Lee’s visionary sculptural creations are also on permanent display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Commissioned for the Yiribana Gallery, Belonging (2021–22) is a series of “body sculptures,” as she describes them, inspired by her close mentor Uncle Ken ... Subscribe to read this article in full
