Rosalind Langford

In stillness, I breathe in the colours of my mother’s country; I am once again at peace and healed. Weaving Yorta Yorta Country is a reflection of my childhood memories. The ever changing colours, different hues of the land, its rivers and plants can be seen in my mother’s country. As a child living with my family on the banks of the Goulbourn River in Victoria, in a small ramshackle hut within an Aboriginal community. I would spend time drawing and colouring plants that I had seen onto hessian bags. My father would collect and hang in our hut hessian bags to try and keep out the winter winds that managed to find ways to enter our hut and chill the bone. My mother would often say that the colours I drew on the hessian helped to bring the outside sunshine inside. My drawings often were a way for me to escape into a fairyland of colour and made my room a beautiful place to be at peace in. My hessian wall reflected the rhythm, movement, and the ever changing yet always interlocking layers of old and new colours of nature that could be seen in the land. Each new season where Mother Nature would brings forth new colours, yet the old seasons colours were still woven tightly together underneath the new season’s colours. Bringing forth a new landscape to teach, to feed, to heal, and for us to be at peace. I have painted my Weaving Yorta Yorta Country painting in a hessian weaving style of 3 layers that represents a woven Yorta Yorta landscape and a reflection of my childhood hessian painted fairyland room. It represents the essence of my childhood and my Yorta Yorta identity.