INSPIRATION JURIED EXHIBITION

DEANNE PALMER

DEANNE PALMER

(Gladesville, AUSTRALIA)

The Mender

encaustic, repurposed hand tatted doilies, gold leaf, 8.2 x 5.5 x 7.8 inches

Price: $449.50

includes tax + shipping fee

Contact Mehrens@eainm.com to verify international shipping fee

ARTIST STATEMENT

The Mender honours the inspirational women in my family, particularly my Nana, born into an Italian immigrant family that settled in Australia. The sculpture reflects how inspiration is carried through lived experience, through resilience, resourcefulness, and the instinct to repair what is broken.

My Nana grew up in Sydney Harbour communities shaped by migration and hardship. When her mother died, she was just twelve years old and left to raise her six younger siblings. With the men often away fishing for weeks at a time, my great-grandfather and later my grandfather among them, the women carried the weight of family life.

Despite poverty, my Nana became the matriarch of our extended family. She ran a mixed business in Woolloomooloo, sewed clothing for everyone, and fixed whatever needed mending, far beyond fabric. She held people together. As the mender, she inspired my interest in environmental repair and restoration.

The Mender forms part of a sculptural trilogy – The Nurturer, The Guardian, and The Mender – vessel-like forms exploring feminine archetypes. Repurposed hand-tatted doilies are embedded within layers of encaustic, transforming symbols of traditional care into structures of resilience. Within the vessel, gold leaf inlay references Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair, where breaks are honoured rather than hidden.

My inspiration comes from the generational strength of women like my Nana, women who repair what life breaks and hold families, histories, and communities together. Their resilience becomes a living inheritance. The Mender is a tribute to that enduring human instinct to mend.

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