Wangaratta-born artist celebrates grandmother’s legacy in textile sculpture

Wangaratta Art Gallery is set to present the first solo hometown exhibition called “Overland” by Wangaratta born and Melbourne-based artist, Matthew Harris. The exhibition offers visitors a unique opportunity to experience the work of the Wangaratta-born talent. Harris creates thought-provoking works in painting and sculpture that critically examine social power structures and historical narratives. His exhibition, “Overland” unpacks the lasting impact of colonisation on the Wangaratta region and its First Peoples, presenting a new series of paintings informed by historical documents. Overland also features “With a Warm Embrace, 2023”, a textile sculpture held in the Wangaratta Art Gallery collection. This was created in tribute to Harris’s grandmother who spent her working life at the Wangaratta Woollen Mills and is inspired by her original design for a pair of koala toys handmade from her husband’s clothes and remnant wool. Harris reimagines this familial object using recycled felt and acrylic yarn sourced from the mills, honouring both personal memory and local industry. The Wangaratta Woollen Mills are an important part of the history of Wangaratta, attracting post-WWII European migrants looking for work, fuelling the growth of Wangaratta's textile industry and adding to the rich cultural mix of Wangaratta and surrounding region. Harris’s sculptures uniquely capture the artistic record of this page of history of Wangaratta. He explained that his work, which is now held in the Wangaratta Art Gallery Collection, is based on stuffed koalas his nanna made out of the coat she was wearing when she met his grandfather. Harris said the original koalas are an inseparable pair and though probably designed to be toys, they’ve always been too special to play with and sit together in a cabinet as relics, now in his mother’s house. “Aside from ourselves and a few other bits and pieces, the koalas are all we have left of my grandparents, they both died when I was little," he said. "Nanna worked at the Wangaratta Woollen Mills most of her life so the koalas are all sewn up with wool from that factory, in a shade of grey the factory conveniently titled 'Koala.” Overland will also feature an important series of large-scale paintings entitled The British Museum, 2023, which was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in 2024, on loan to Wangaratta Art Gallery for this exhibition. Wangaratta Art Gallery director, Rachel Arndt said Harris’s work is significant to Wangaratta in so many ways and she is very excited to be presenting this important work in the gallery. “We are privileged in being able to secure the loan of The British Museum series of Harris’s paintings from the National Gallery of Victoria - a fantastic opportunity for our visitors to see work from the state collection, in Wangaratta,” she said. The British Museum in London, UK, holds a staggering 6000 objects, many culturally significant, that are connected to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. In the series of six paintings, Harris depicts a silhouette of these artifacts and physical remains in the British Museum collection, in their racks and boxes. Former NGV curator, Michael Gentle explained that in developing the work, Harris accessed the British Museum’s collection online and painted, in alphabetical order, a selection of these objects housed in the museum. Gentle added that rather than providing detailed renderings, Harris gives an intentionally obscured representation, a meta-critique of the archive’s own tendency to abstract and decontextualise the objects within its possession. Harris has exhibited at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Victoria for Melbourne Now 2023, Gertrude Contemporary, Neon Parc in Melbourne, Murray Art Museum Albury, Galerie Pompom, Alaska Projects, Sydney, and the Yokohama Triennial in Japan. His work will feature in the upcoming Adelaide Biennial 2026. He is represented by FUTURES gallery in Melbourne and The Commercial in Sydney. An exhibition opening celebration will take place on Saturday, 25 October 4pm and all are welcome. The exhibition will then run until 18 January 2026.

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