Threads Exhibition 2024

Client:

The Mill, Adelaide

Threads is an evocative and deeply personal exhibition that weaves together the tangled strands of memory, trauma, healing, and identity. Created by Kat Bell, the exhibition brings painting, textiles, basketry, beadwork, macramé, crochet, and mixed media sculpture into an interconnected storytelling space. Through vibrant colour, playful forms, and tactile materials, Threads explores how dreams and memories knot, fray, and unravel across a lifetime shaped by both hardship and resilience. [
At its core, Threads reflects on the experiences of surviving trauma—particularly through the lens of a First Nations woman living with PTSD—and the lifelong work of piecing oneself back together. Despite the gravity of these themes, the artworks embrace lightness, imagination, humour, and rich colour. This contrast is intentional: it reflects the artist’s own journey of reclaiming agency and joy, of transforming painful histories into pathways of growth, clarity, and renewal.
Each artwork acts as a “thread” in an ever shifting tapestry of story and self. Some threads represent dreams—recurrent, surreal, symbolic landscapes where the artist learned to navigate fear, reclaim control, and rebuild her inner world. Others reference cultural continuity, such as traditional basketry (Jawun), connections to Country, and the role of language and inherited memory. Together, these pieces trace the complex entanglements of identity, intergenerational storytelling, and the healing power of creativity.
The exhibition brings together paintings, digital artworks, woven baskets, sculptural forms, textile dolls, and symbolic objects. Themes include:
• Healing and transformation: Brightly coloured visual narratives that move from darkness into light.
• Dreamscapes and memory: Symbolic creatures, shifting landscapes, and recurring motifs that explore the mind’s role in processing trauma.
• Cultural threads: Works honouring the artist’s Girramay and Gudjal heritage through weaving, language, and references to ancestral craft.
• Embodied experience: Pieces that speak to chronic pain, anxiety, masking, motherhood, grief, and resilience.
Throughout Threads, the artist invites viewers into intimate, often tender spaces—spaces where memory collides with imagination, where trauma is both acknowledged and transformed, and where each fragment contributes to a larger, evolving sense of strength and self determination. The exhibition is ultimately about reclamation: the slow, deliberate act of gathering up the threads of one’s life and weaving them into something whole, connected, and sovereign.

Year:

2024