Artist Talks | Jemima Wyman & Emily Simek

Hear from Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award 2025 artists Jemima Wyman and Emily Simek as they speak to their work in the award exhibition as well as their practice and process more broadly.

Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award 2025 winner Jemima Wyman will join us live from her home in LA. Wyman's winning work, Haze 19, 2024 is a custom-printed Chiffon curtain spanning over 6 metres in length, and forms part of a series of ‘Haze’ curtains which, according to the artist, function as ideological textiles. Coined by Wyman, this is a term for textiles that carry political ideas in their fibres, like soviet era propaganda textiles, war rugs, military camouflage and protest attire. At the same time, they’re decorative, deceptive and tactical devices for conflict.

Emily Simek's work Hot Compost Home Tour explores composting as a methodology for the making and sharing of textile artworks. The quilt is made using up-cycled materials from a prior body of work the artist made in collaboration with a worm farm compost system, including 3D scans of food scraps destined for the compost - pumpkin rinds, banana skins - and cotton dyed with plants from a community garden.

Emily Simek, Hot Compost Home Tour, 2024, detail, scrap quilt with digital print on cotton and plant dyes: marigold, oxalis, chamomile, eucalyptus leaves, onion skin, and avocado seed, variable objects from collaborators homes, 220 x 220cm. Installation view, Wangaratta Art Gallery, 2025. Photo Jeremy Weihrauch.