Caring to Notice: Sera Waters’ Disentangled Pasts, Attentive Reparation and Truth-Telling Toward Survivable Futures

Abstract

This essay engages with activist artistic practice of Sera Waters, an Adelaide-based Australian textile artist. Waters unstitches deep histories in an attempt to repair what was broken by settler colonialism to foster “familiar activism,” truth-telling and attentive noticing to the interface of social and environmental justice. Her latest visual arts project Future Traditions (2020–ongoing) explores, via textile and craft practice, the potential in unravelling and redirecting domestic traditions, and disturbing their colonial legacies. Thinking with Waters, I coimagine alternative survivable futures to open up the possibility of an ethical future that acknowledges the responsibility and response-ability, via processes of witnessing and noticing, to mobilize an attentive, reparative and communal relationship to difference. Within the overarching framework of ethics of care the essay focuses on Waters’s engagement with the notions of ghosts and colonial knots that have led to her recent project concerned with the future of tradition building. It contemplates her conceptualization of needlework sampling as a method and a strategy applied in the face of exacerbating ecological crisis to foster interconnectedness despite colonial, neoliberalist and capitalist failings.