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Garland magazine The stories behind what we make Garland is a platform that features thoughtful writing about objects.

The quarterly issue includes a long-form essay on a single object, as well as a focus on a city in the region, craft classics, workshops and an online exhibition. Garland includes work from around the world, but with a Pacific perspective, reflecting the dialogue of cultures in this region. The first issue was launched at the Cheongju International Craft Biennale, South Korea, and the second is launched as part of the Adelaide Biennial.

Shelanu ✿ The immigrant jewellers who adorn BirminghamDeirdre Figueiredo tells the story of a remarkable collective of m...
28/07/2025

Shelanu ✿ The immigrant jewellers who adorn Birmingham
Deirdre Figueiredo tells the story of a remarkable collective of migrant and refugee jewellers who, after twenty years, are passing on their skills.
https://garlandmag.com/shelanu/

Find out more in Garland Loop ✿

Ramayana Reimagined: A tale with a thousand voicesNatasha Sarkar is inspired by the multiplicity of Ramayanas around the...
25/07/2025

Ramayana Reimagined: A tale with a thousand voices

Natasha Sarkar is inspired by the multiplicity of Ramayanas around the world.
https://garlandmag.com/article/ramayana/

✿ Excerpts:

In the waning days of October 2011, a storm was brewing in one of India’s top universities. In what felt like an overzealous act of censorship, the powers that be decided to pull A.K. Ramanujan’s thought-provoking essay, *Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation*, from the undergraduate syllabus.

the story has been retold, reimagined, and reshaped over centuries.

before I knew it, I was painting one reinterpretation after another. All those paintings came together in a book I eventually called *Whose Ramayana Is It Anyway?*—a title intended to challenge notions of ownership and identity surrounding the epic.

To the Thais, Indonesians, and Cambodians, Ram possessed heroic and romantic qualities but was by no means a God; just a man—flawed, fascinating, and very human.

✿Read more in G39
✿ Ancestors are Here

Karin Montgomery ✿ The Camellia SocietyOur July Laurel is awarded to Karin Montgomery for her exquisitely crafted paper ...
25/07/2025

Karin Montgomery ✿ The Camellia Society

Our July Laurel is awarded to Karin Montgomery for her exquisitely crafted paper flora.
https://garlandmag.com/karin-montgomery/

✿ Excerpts:

Montgomery’s exceptional paper craft reflects her attentiveness to the ecology of her garden and immediate inner-city neighbourhood. She has a background as a textile importer and has long appreciated botanical art — favourite examples include the ‘paper mosaicks’ of Mary Delany made in eighteenth-century England and the watercolours of F***y Osborne of the indigenous flora surrounding her home on Aotea, Great Barrier Island, at the end of the nineteenth century.

Montgomery’s own earliest paper flora were made during New Zealand’s first Covid lockdown in 2020, based on unremarkable flowers foraged on daily walks and plucked from buckets outside the local dairy. Her more recent work reflects research into whaler gardens in Aotearoa and the Chinese origins of local species. In 2024, Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand acquired Montgomery’s A Garden for Nicola Azzariti, a collection of 8 species common in Aotearoa during the period 1820-90, dedicated to her Great Grandfather, a fisherman from Trani, a seaport of Apulia, Southern Italy, who landed in Port Chalmers, New Zealand in 1875.

Find out more in Garland Loop ✿

A driftwood testamentDean Greeno continues his ancestors' practice of using dead trees as memorials.https://garlandmag.c...
24/07/2025

A driftwood testament

Dean Greeno continues his ancestors' practice of using dead trees as memorials.
https://garlandmag.com/article/the-driftwood-story/

✿ Excerpts:

“Driftwood”. It might as well be my nickname. Throughout my life, I’ve drifted along the currents of change—more than 40 jobs, several career paths, and an archive of certificates from defensive driving to aircraft maintenance engineering. The source of my constant evolution? Lady Barron on Flinders Island, where my family ran a commercial fishing fleet.

The house was originally constructed from timber salvaged from shipwrecks along the east coast of the island. Positioned near the “Potboil” (a shallow stretch of water with shifting sandbars), the house was surrounded by relics from the sea.

Each piece is a testament to time, weather, and the life process. When you pull a piece from the sand, you’re not just retrieving wood. You’re uncovering entire ecosystems in miniature fungi, mycelium, and slime moulds, each of which tells a quiet story of its own.

In ancient times, our ancestors would place the dead in hollow trees, covering them so their essences could merge with the tree and pass on knowledge and spirit. Sculpting with driftwood, in a way, is an extension of that practice.

it’s the driftwood itself—sun-bleached, weathered, and still standing in solitude that always calls me to continue the journey.

✿
Read more in G39 ✿ Ancestors are Here

Woven in stone: Bringing ancient Indonesia to life on the loomBernhard Bart writes about songket inspired by stone statu...
23/07/2025

Woven in stone: Bringing ancient Indonesia to life on the loom

Bernhard Bart writes about songket inspired by stone statues from ancient Indonesia
https://garlandmag.com/article/songket-statues/

✿ Excerpts:

It was a challenge to copy the carved motif from the Syamatara statue and to adapt it for songket weaving. The result of the brocade technique can be seen below.

ince we are both already 78 years old, the pace is quite leisurely. After breakfast, we usually make a round in the studio, where the weavers start working between 8 and 9 in the morning. The required hours are 7 hours a day (with a one-hour lunch break), 6 days a week. We employ 13 young people from the village and other places close by. They are allowed to bring their small children with them to the studio so they can also take care of them during working hours.

Bukittinggi has a very pleasant climate, and we like to sit on our balcony drinking tea or coffee, reading, or watching the birds and butterflies in the garden.

✿
Read more in G39 ✿ Ancestors are Here

Ten years ago, the Garland journey started with the help of Melbourne Artists for Asylum Seekers, a talented group of ma...
22/07/2025

Ten years ago, the Garland journey started with the help of Melbourne Artists for Asylum Seekers, a talented group of mainly Iranian artists led by Azizeh Astaneh. They hand-painted covers for our first issue.

Many applied the Persian "Tazhib", a floral border that is painted onto important books. It was the perfect expression for a publication titled Garland.

Thank you to all the makers and writers who have shared their cultural heritage over the past decade. They help us keep our cultures afloat in a sea of hashtags and memes.

We need stories. Stories need us.

🌸 متشکرم.

The Rest of Us: Soft publishing as an act of radical careIn a homage to bookbinding, the pages of this book are individu...
18/07/2025

The Rest of Us: Soft publishing as an act of radical care

In a homage to bookbinding, the pages of this book are individually knitted as blankets to be read and used by readers across the world.
https://garlandmag.com/article/the-rest-of-us/

✿ Excerpts:

For this book, we write one new page every week and publish it directly to our website each Friday. Pages are acquired by readers around the world. After purchase, each digital page is then knitted as a one-off jacquard blanket. Each page weighs one kilo and measures 185cm x 150cm in size. Enclosed in a hand-sewn calico bag, dyed using plant materials from our own garden, pages are carefully documented and then folded and posted to their readers.

Through this work we seek to unfold a broader conversation around “thanatology”—the study of death and dying—a cycle that is always drawn from longer threads of living experience.

the work must inevitably begin with the trouble of how to make one’s narrative palatable. By this we mean publicly shareable, exchangeable; and unusually, in this case, wearable too.

it is not such a leap from analog letterpress printing to the digital jacquard loom.

Our process of book design pays tribute to the craft of bookbinding, in particular the gathering of loose-leaf folios and printed serials. At the top of every page we place a “catchphrase”—a historical device that enables the reader to trace a flow of text from one page to the next.

Each page number corresponds to the calendar day of the year since the first day of publication. For example, page #263, which begins with the catchphrase “How Hard It Is To Love What We Cannot See”, was published on day 263—the 20th September 2024.

✿
Read more in G39 ✿ Ancestors are Here


@

The NFT Mother of GodEmma Cieslik writes about Beatrice Vigoni's pixelated homage to the Salvadorian icon, La Señora de ...
17/07/2025

The NFT Mother of God

Emma Cieslik writes about Beatrice Vigoni's pixelated homage to the Salvadorian icon, La Señora de la Paz.
https://garlandmag.com/article/the-nft-mother-of-god/

✿ Excerpts:

Her mural was a pixelated reinterpretation of the traditional Salvadoran icon *La Señora de la Paz*, a reference to how her art explores the spiritual and symbolic ancestry of the Virgin Mary and its impact on women in Christian nations today.

The Greek principle of *Kalokagathia,* or the idea that creating and stewarding aesthetics is a form of service to the community, influenced her training ever since she was 14.

Art, she says, “has a spiritual nature, as it touches the depths of the human psyche, speaks from within it, and finds expression through the primary forms of nature.” This is the central ethic of the Holy Club

The digital artistic medium is controversial among creative communities, especially when created with AI-image generating programs and NFT values are deeply unstable, so Vigoni set out to create a fresh and marked a new, multi-dimensional interpretation of Mary, or a human mother, and sell them to raise money for women and human rights.

“The pixel, by freeing the figure from standard and predefined features,” Vigoni said, “offers a more personal and accessible view of the image, making its interpretation more intimate.”

✿
Read more in G39 ✿ Ancestors are Here


Mobile ancestral hallTammy Wong Hulbert journeys from her home on Wurundjeri country to the land of her ancestors in Sie...
16/07/2025

Mobile ancestral hall

Tammy Wong Hulbert journeys from her home on Wurundjeri country to the land of her ancestors in Siew Chek Hum village, southern China.
https://garlandmag.com/article/mobile-ancestral-hall/

Featuring: The original Wong Family – Nellie Wong, Ah Kue, Fred Wong, W***y Wong, George Wong, Wong Sing Fu and Jean Wong, Cobar, NSW, 1916. National Archives of Australia.

✿ Excerpts:

My recent project *Wong Mobile Ancestral Hall* (2024) attempted to converse and grapple with this complexity through the depiction of my ancestral home of 小赤坎 *(Siew Chek Hum* / *Xiao Chi Kan)* village, Guangdong Province, China, as a mobile ancestral home. Transforming a small suitcase into ancestral architecture, I carried my ancestral home (my baggage) on my back, as part of a walking residency *On Country/In Residence* (October 2024) on *ngurrak barring* (meaning mountain path in Woi Wurrung language).

As an artist trained in the applied arts, I am passionate about how crafted objects can metaphorically represent our valued journeys, memories, rituals and stories of places, people and communities.

Reflecting on this history, I dared to ask, “Who were we before we arrived in Australia?” Asking this question took me on a fascinating exploration to understand Chinese cultural practices of ancestral worship, leading me on a journey to find our ancestral home and consider the abstract idea of ‘belonging’ to a place.

In this Wong village, there were three Wong ancestral halls 育亭黄公祠 *(Yuk Ting Wong Gung Ci / Yu Ting Huang Gong Ci),* 直吾黄公祠 *(Zhi Mai Wong Gung Ci / Zhi Wu Huang Gong Ci),* 祠公黃亭育 *(Ci Gung Wong Ting Yuk / Ci Gong Huang Ting Yu),* all within walking distance of each other.

✿
Read more in G39 ✿ Ancestors are Here


Durbar festivals in Nigeria: How Jigawa and Ilorin are rising beyond Kano’s shadowEmmanuel Solate heralds the revival of...
15/07/2025

Durbar festivals in Nigeria: How Jigawa and Ilorin are rising beyond Kano’s shadow

Emmanuel Solate heralds the revival of the Durbar festival in Kano, northern Nigeria.
https://garlandmag.com/durbar/

Find out more in Garland Loop ✿

"Recreating Gesture: The Replica of the Celtic Torc of Montans" exhibition at L'ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts is a resea...
14/07/2025

"Recreating Gesture: The Replica of the Celtic Torc of Montans" exhibition at L'ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts is a research project at the crossroads of archaeology and the history of techniques. This collaborative experimental archaeology adventure aimed to understand the skills and techniques of a given period by reproducing the Montans torc.

The original Celtic torc, a rigid gold neck collar, was discovered in 1843 at Montans in the Tarn region of southern France and dates from the Second Iron Age (450–25 BC). The complexity of this 2,500-year-old Celtic neck ring was beyond initial comprehension.

"Recreating Gesture: The Replica of the Celtic Torc of Montans" exhibition at L'ÉCOLE, School of Jewellery Arts, is a research project at the crossroads of archaeology and the history of techniques. This collaborative experimental archaeology adventure aimed to understand the skills and techniques of a given period by reproducing the Montans torc.c.ct and how the intelligence and knowledge of craftsmen are decisive and complement scholarly knowledge.

Goldsmith Antoine Legouy, a master chaser, collaborated with archaeologists and Gregory Weinstock, Van Cleef & Arpels’ Director of High Jewellery Métiers, to recreate and understand these delicate forms. Legouy aimed to "follow in their footsteps" to rediscover forgotten techniques, emphasising the contribution of crafts to understanding the object and how the intelligence and knowledge of craftsmen are decisive and complement scholarly knowledge.

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