Autumn Retreat - Tapestries of Light

Over 2024 Muse + Maker will be hosting a series of seasonal creative retreats, with some of Australia's most prominent artists, that will facilitate exchanges of art-making, community, music, food, and nature. Choosing unique and inspiring locations, such as the rambling beauty of the Robertson Hotel, Muse + Maker will create opportunities for people to make, share, and imagine the world differently. Each retreat will offer a curated selection of movement workshops, art making and shared meals, to create opportunities for creative thinking and being.

Autumn retreat includes overnight accommodation at the beautiful Robertson Hotel, fully catered. Evening entertainment by a variety of the best of the Australian Music Industry .

Autumn Retreat - Tapestries of Light

Many hands make life work. Lace-making, fabric patterning, and embroidery are embedded within histories of craft and domesticity yet also have the sly and subversive potential to be labours of love, longing, desire; and even protest. Learning textile skills from some of Australia’s leading contemporary artists you will make your own lace sampler, fabric project and work on a collaborative wallpaper whilst learning about witches, collective labour, queer stories and magic.

Participate, engage, learn, share and walk away with original artworks in collaboration with some of Australia's most celebrated contemporary artists.

Rebel Stitches, with Paul Yore

Artist Paul Yore works primarily with found images and text, utilising waste products, trash, broken and otherwise discarded materials. Yore sees this act of reclaiming as both an assertion against the wastefulness of consumer society, and as the opening up of new and imaginary spaces of self-expression. This workshop will invite participants to reimagine materials by working with unworn clothes, discards, scraps and off-cuts, old wool and threads, unfinished cross stitch, quilts and any other abandoned craft projects or materials that begun in anticipation and have ended up forgotten in boxes, drawers and cupboards. Rescuing materials that might otherwise have ended up in landfill, we will be producing pieces that challenge the banality of mainstream culture and embrace disorder, hybridity and the fantastical.

You will create your own work in collaboration with Paul Yore. Materials supplied but bring abandoned craft projects for inspiration.

Paul Yore is one of Australia’s most thought provoking and consequential multidisciplinary artists. Born in Naarm/Melbourne in 1987, he lives and works on Gunaikurnai Country in Gippsland, Victoria, and completed his studies in painting, archaeology and anthropology at Monash University in 2010. Yore’s work engages with the histories of religious art and ritual, queer identity, pop-culture and neo-liberal capitalism, recasting a vast array of found images, materials and texts into sexually and politically loaded tableaux and assemblages which celebrate hybrid and fluid identities, unstable and contradictory meanings, and the glowing horizon of queer world making.

Mundane Poetry, with Maggie Hensal Brown

Hensal Brown’s lace takes techniques from various needle traditions to create contemporary imagery. Inspired by classical pictorial needle lace panels, Hensel-Brown’s work tells stories of the most mundane parts of her life: experiencing the highs and lows of the contemporary world.

Each workshop participant will make their own sampler, all materials will be supplied.

Maggie Hensel Brown specializes in contemporising traditional lace techniques. In 2015 she started working with Australian lacemakers to study, teach and build the profile of needle-made laces. She has training in Reticella, Punto in Aria, Aemilia Ars and Venetian Gros Point needle laces, and creates her works using a combination of techniques drawn from each of those traditions. Her works are based on the long tradition of storytelling in needle lace. Drawing from her own life, her laces use thousands of tiny traditional stitches to tell stories of contemporary moments of frustration, boredom and bliss.

Repeating Circles, with Zanny Begg

If you think history is on your side, let me tell you women did not write these books, if they did the stories would be different, Christine de Pizan.

While this may sound like a comment on our contemporary culture, Christin de Pizan wrote these words in 1402. Inspired by late medieval drawings, such as those used to illustrate Christine de Pizan's manuscript, The Book of The City of Ladies, Zanny will take participants on a journey through the bizarre, monstrous, sexually ambiguous, magical and inexplicable imagery of this era. Working across time Zanny will reimagine ancient witches, outcasts, healers, monsters and demons for our own times inviting workshop participants to create their own drawings and learn the art of tiling a pattern.

Participants will work alone, and with others, to create repeating patterns for fabric or wallpaper. At the end of the retreat participants can order tea towels, clothing or other items of their choice to take away with them.

Zanny Begg, based on Dharawal Country, Bulli, is an award-winning artist and filmmaker who creates compelling stories on complex and nuanced topics. She won Best Director Melbourne Documentary Film Festival (2023), The Visual Arts Creative Fellowship, Create Australia (2023), the 66th Blake Prize Established Artist Residency (2021), the inaugural ACMI and Artbank film commission (2018), the Incinerator Art Award (2016), and the Terrence and Lynnette Fern Cite Residency Paris (2016). Zanny has exhibited widely in Australia, and globally, including eight biennales, and her work is currently touring across Australia in two major video exhibitions These Stories Will be Different, Museum & Galleries NSW; and Between the Details, an ACMI Collection exhibition of Australia video art.

YOU ALREADY KNOW - artist talk and workshop
Beginning with an introductory artist talk, You Already Know is an experimental textile workshop facilitated by multidisciplinary artist Liam Benson. The guided creative process includes a series of mindfulness, design and embroidery techniques that support participants to create a crystalised representation of the experiences that guide and inform us throughout our life.

Liam Benson is a multi-disciplinary socially engaged artist based on Dharug Country, Western Sydney. Incorporating performance, photography, video and textiles, his practice reflects on the exchange within identity and culture as a living dualistic process which is both informed by and challenges historical, political, and social consciousness. Liam is the Creative Director of We Are Studios, a 100% disability-led, inclusive studio that empowers artists with disability to reach their creative potential by creating space to thrive. Liam has over a decade of experience in arts education, community engagement and creative workshop facilitation within nationwide cultural and education institutions, and community spaces. Liam Benson’s works are held in significant public and private collections including The MCA Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Artbank and Western Sydney University.

The Slow Walk, with Emma Saunders

Walking plays a special role in the lives of artists, from early training tools within performative practices since the 60s to the minimalist photographic series lines made by walking, by Richard Long. Brought to the mainstream by performance artist Marina Abramovic, and introduced to Emma Saunders by NY based dance artist Miguel Gutierrez, this participatory workshop will see Emma invite participants to integrate walking into their own life practice and, just for that extended moment in time, transform the way we experience ourselves, each other and the world around us.

Emma Saunders works as a director, choreographer, performer, educator and curator. She is interested in the simplicity of dance and the complexity of choreography. Utilizing a visceral, instinctive attack, her work is immediate, often working with humour, everyday movement, text, repetition, deconstruction, duration and abstraction. Emma is a co-founding member of the award-winning Sydney based trio, The Fondue Set, who have created multiple works including Green Room Award-winning No Success Like Failure presented at the Sydney Opera House (2008) and Dance Massive, Arts House (2009). With The Fondue Set, Emma has also toured internationally including London, Vienna, Berlin, Brussels, Amsterdam and a residency in Paris at the Centre de la Danse. For her solo work, Emma has been shortlisted for two Australian Dance Awards and commissioned twice by Sydney Festival, including the acclaimed outdoor site-specific work, Encounter.