ARTIST IN RESIDENCE EXHIBITION
27 June – 1 August
LOUNGE GALLERY
Opening Saturday 27 June 2–4pm
Please join Sera to celebrate the launch of Sampling Ecologies. Sera joins studio friends Valerie Kirk, Libby Rose and Joseph Boas for an informative series of short artist talks from 2:30pm.
Before the eighteenth-century stitched samplers were used to pass along patterns and knowledge from one generation to the next. In consideration of our inheritances and legacies, Waters creates contemporary samplers responding to the distinctive patterns of living here and now, continuing the sampler tradition of documenting swiftly changing times for future generations. From her residency at Sauerbier House, she discovers patterns identified from local interconnected ecologies and time-travelling narratives, to create textile samplers experimenting in embroidery, dyeing and printing.
Sera Waters is an artist living on Kaurna Country, South Australia. Hand embroidery has been central to Waters’s art practice since receiving a Ruth Tuck Scholarship to attend the Royal School of Needlework (UK) in 2006. Her practice employs the material intimacy and intergenerational knowledge of hand embroidery to examine ongoing legacies of settler-colonial homemaking, specifically through domestic textiles, hand-craft traditions, and familial patterns. This was the focus of her PhD, ‘Genealogical Ghostscapes’, completed in 2018, University of South Australia, supervised by Emeritus Professor Kay Lawrence. In 2022 Waters was selected for the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Free/State at Art Gallery of South Australia. Her series, Storied Sail Cloths, travelled to the Busan Biennale 2022: We, on the Rising Wave, South Korea. Major exhibitions include Future Traditions (2022) and Radical Textiles (2025) at Art Gallery of South Australia, Eucalyptusdom, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney (2021) and Poetics of Place II curated by Melinda Young at ATTA Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand (2025). Waters’s works are held by the Australian War Memorial, Cruthers collection of Women’s art, Ararat Regional Gallery, Art Gallery of South Australia, Artbank, Powerhouse and private collections across Australia.
Sera is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery.
Image: Washed Up (detail), 2026, cotton on hand-dyed linen, 15 x 8cm. Photograph courtesy Artist. Headshot Sia Duff.
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