“I see my art practice as a way to make sense of who I am, why I’m here, and how I can change” says Marianne Penberthy.

Marianne is an artist based in Geraldton, on Yamaji Country, working mostly with textiles, mixed-media, sculpture, and installation. During a recent visit to her home studio, she shared with us the importance of process in her work and making sense through doing. Our conversation explored themes of healing and repair and navigating a sense of place and connection to the landscape.

Image Credit: Marianne Penberthy in her home. Photography by Elliot Brown.

Marianne was an imaginative child and enjoyed making something out of nothing. She grew up near the Glass Mountains in Queensland, telling us “So that was the backdrop of my every day. We swam in the still waters of the Pumicestone Passage. I was always walking the bush tracks”.

Her connection to the landscape of her childhood is complex. “You start off as a child and you walk on the surface. And so, you develop a relationship with the ground, but you don’t think much else” she explained.

“I was born in the late 40’s. Our education was Eurocentric. We didn’t have the full story or know anything about the real history of Australia. So, at that point, I just saw the land through the eyes of a child”.

As a young adult Marianne left Queensland under difficult circumstances, having lost both of her parents. Newly married, she and her husband travelled and worked in remote Far North Queensland, then lived for a period on Croker Island and Elcho Island in the Northern Territory, on Yolngu Country.

“My husband was building houses. Elcho Island was my first interaction with Indigenous people. That short experience was pivotal for me. Looking back now on the importance of that time, it has taken me many more decades to really understand my relationship with the land and my sense of belonging”.

Moving to Western Australia was like coming to a new land entirely, like “Green versus red,” said Marianne. They lived in Kalbarri on Nanda Country, before moving to Geraldton, where she attended TAFE and sparked an interest in textiles. Wanting to develop her art practice, she moved to Perth to study textiles at university.

“The experience of leaving a home place under difficult circumstances does come back to greet you at some point in life” said Marianne, “And an Aboriginal friend of mine said to me ‘Sometimes you need to go home to mend things’”.

After graduating, Marianne and her sister Kerry Johns who is also an artist and painter, revisited Caloundra, Queensland. “I knew we would be scratching the surface of childhood memory, loss, and place, and how we had experienced that place. There was the beginning of that sense of belonging that I was searching for. And which I had recognised within Indigenous people. I was looking for a deeper connection to place, not just the surface level of describing the land, but rather an experience of being in the land and belonging to it somehow. And I did that through going home”.

“I think working with my art practice within the landscape certainly helped” she continued. Marianne began to create temporary works in the landscape by writing on the ground, sifting flour over lace and sticks onto the ground and found metal objects. For her, the flour spoke to the project of colonisation, “It’s grown on the land, harvested, processed. The flour has been through some kind of a change. Sifting speaks to women in isolation, living on the land, and to those aspects of being human” she said.

“I found this wedding dress at a dump shop, and I took it out into the landscape. I just felt, that in life, you have dreams and aspirations. It was a symbolic thing. I was talking about isolation, and I wanted to give voice to a female in that kind of landscape, so the lace became important”.

Sifting is like “sorting things out” said Marianne. “I don’t quite know how to describe it, but it is a pleasant thing to do. It was also joyful to come out to work the next morning and see what had crawled over it during the night, to see the crows leave a mark. So we had this interaction in a way”.

Marianne has a long-term interest in Korean patchwork bojagi, a process of stitching together small scraps of fabric. “It taught me the value of the remnant” she told us, “There’s some possibility in everything. And that can be anything, from fabric, to a remnant of land”.

Her flour installations, like bojagi patchwork, also speak to the idea of quilts and wrapping. “When you go out there, you see a lot of holes in the ground, and you see a lot of damage. I liked the idea of wrapping the land, even if it was just conceptual or symbolic. It speaks of mending. But I’m also talking about internal mending. Not just fixing clothing, but mending a situation, mending the land, or going back to a childhood place to reconcile and move forward. So, I like to think that my work is about mending and repairing and reparation.

Her installation String Lines similarly makes a connection between textile remnants and the land. “Following my husband’s passing, I was in some physical recovery, and all I could do was make string” she shared. “He was a builder. I found his string line together with the remnants of his tools. It was just an old piece of wood, possibly a garden stake with string wound around it, but to me it was this amazing object. It represented a lifetime of working in the construction industry in Western Australian particularly on iron ore mines. It also represented much more”.

“I still wanted to talk about colonisation and the way land is divided up, how we see the land and yet don’t see the land. The survey peg represents that, together with the certificate of title, maps, boundaries, and divided landscapes. I began tearing up all his work clothes to make string”.

This interest in string and stitchwork goes back to university, where she started embedding rope in the ground as a stitch. “I had this towrope of my husband’s that I chopped up and put in the ground. Then I started to pick up sticks and use them as a stitch.”

Marianne saw a relation between stitching and breathing, explaining “It’s the in and out of the breath through the cloth. There’s something meditative about that. I stitched continuous lines, which is rhythmic. In the process, I realised, “This is just like breathing, like the sound of breathing”, pulling a needling in and out. There’s a rhythm and a sound to it”.

Marianne is driven by experimentation and not-knowing, saying “It goes back to process. It’s not about the end-product. I want to be open to where something needs to go rather than trying to get a product”.

“If I know what it’s supposed to be, well, then, for me, there’s no point in doing it. I like to begin and just see where it goes. To learn what the material will or won’t do. The importance is the doing and the process of making”.

Working in this way can be challenging, Marianne explained “You have to fight off a lot of things, like self-doubt, questioning, ‘am I doing the right thing? Is this saying what it’s supposed to?’ But when you get caught up in all that internal dialogue, then you don’t allow for the freedom of making. And it’s the making that’s most important because it’s the relationship you have with your thinking brain, your hand, and being a human. It’s finding a way to be comfortable with that. And that’s what my practice has taught me”.

“Through my own experience, coming through adversity, and recent vision loss, I’ve become more interested in psychology, and what it means to be human. How the beginning of life influences your entire life, how you can connect with that and how you can come through adversity and be okay with it”.

Marianne’s admits her connection to Geraldton, her home, is complex. “I’m still trying to find it. I’m looking for a sense of ease internally of just being here. I don’t feel wholly connected to Geraldton because there’s parts of me that are still connected to Queensland”.

“There’s a lot to come to terms with when you do these internal investigations. But I think once you put a ripple out, then it spreads and shifts. And it’s subtle. It’s not like a tidal wave. One person, I think, doing this internal work around land can make a difference for the whole. So that’s what I’m content to do now, I can’t say yet that I feel totally connected, but that might still come”.

Marianne is working toward both solo and group projects in 2024, and is featured in the current exhibitions Promise: Material & Matter at Lost Eden Creative, Dwellingup until September 24, Open Borders Regional Arts Triennial at John Curtin Gallery until October 8, and The Alternative Archive touring regional WA with ART ON THE MOVE until 2024. Additionally, Marianne will be participating in the 2023 Geraldton and Surrounds Open Studios from September 16 – 24.