Ngaire Pakai
Ngaire Pakai
NAIDOC 'Strength, Vision, Legacy" Woven Corset
Raw and naturally dyed raffia. 32 x 40 x 42 cm 2025
Made with raffia coloured with Country, dyed with gum leaves, wattle, tree sap and food scraps. Woven together using the remains of a deconstructed project, this work winds together pieces of the old and new to create a visual story. Three coils representing strength, vision and legacy are prominent on the bodice filled with colours of greys, greens, browns framed with raw raffia. Flowing from the circular forms are yellow and green meandering journey lines that connect the symbolic woven circles, and wrap around to the back of the corset, representing individual and intertwined pathways.
Ngaire Pakai is a proud Wiradjuri and Māori woman artist creating and working on Awabakal Country, Newcastle. Ngaire draws on her cultural connections and practices to inform her artmaking, working across many mediums including painting, digital art, weaving and textiles. With a particular interest in Aboriginal weaving, learnt more than 7 years ago through cultural revitalisation programs run by staunch Aboriginal women based in the Hunter region. Ngaire’s personal art practice is to create work that explores Aboriginal ways of making by confusing the contemporary, re-imagining cultural weaving, and indigenising the mundane.