• 

• 

Wendy Alexander

Regent Honeyeater – money-eater clutch

Clutch purse knitted using traditional colour-work techniques, displayed on a foil cake-board. Wool, plastic button, wire, cake-board. H: 40 cm x W: 40 cm x D: 5cm.

Knitted fabric inspired by the complex ‘negative’ patterning of black/white, and deep gold highlights, in the feathering of the critically endangered Regent Honeyeater. Constructing the fabric into a clutch purse alludes to the derogatory term ‘Regent money-eater’, used by critics who both mock funds spent on saving the species and its habitat, and bemoan the income denied to developers in the face of these efforts. The cake-board is a shiny backdrop of frivolity, akin in tone to the term ‘regent money-eater’, and in stark contrast to the tenuous future of a bird species on the edge of extinction.

Barka Menindee Fish Kill

Knitted and crocheted collage wall-hanging. Wool, acrylic, cotton, eucalypt branch. H: 46 cm x W: 46 cm x D: 3cm

This work was created in response to the massive fish kills in the Barka at Menindee in January 2019. The work aims to convey the desperate last moments of a decades-old Murray Cod: pallid, mouth open, gasping for oxygen in a dying river.

Wendy Alexander lives at Billywillinga near Bathurst NSW. She uses (variously) text, image and yarn in an arts-based practice that responds to contemporary environmental, social and cultural ‘matters of concern’. She is wary of one-dimensional ‘matters of fact’.