Traces

From Gilgandra, NSW, the waterhole meeting place of the Wiradjuri, Wailwan and Kamilaroi peoples, artist Clementine Belle McIntosh’s site-based regenerative practice investigates nonlinear material cycles through gifting, reclamation and site-responsive making. Working with unwanted fabrics, plant dyes and locally sourced detritus, McIntosh considers how materials are shaped, extracted and circulated within dominant production and consumption systems. Drawing on methodologies informed by gift economies and place-based research, she employs slow iterative processes such as staining, stitching and the accumulation of “muck” to materialise felt entanglements with place and open alternative modes of care and reciprocity.

In her series of textile works, McIntosh expands these concerns to reflect on her position as a young female in rural Australia. Referencing poststructural feminist theory as well as her own lived experience, she examines the assumed passivity of women in patriarchal agricultural communities by employing the “hole” as a poetic metaphor. Respectively, McIntosh integrates embodied and time-intensive processes such as: hand beading, dyeing and embroidering donated, discarded and inherited cotton sheets, tablecloths, handkerchiefs and fabric scraps; shooting firearms; harvesting plant dyes and materially participating in local gift economies. As a result, her work asserts their own subjectivity through material agency and a rejection of commodification.

The presence of the “hole” in written, physical and metaphorical forms operates as a critique on dualistic beliefs that lesser others lack wholeness in the places they occupy without the context of dominant power. Through reclaiming discarded household fabrics and their subsequent gauze holes, gunshot holes, sewing holes and torn holes, McIntosh enacts wholeness as something felt relationally with place rather than understood instrumentally.

These works were completed in part during an artist residency at The Corridor Project in 2024 and 2025.