Katja Wagner

Mist in making: an urban bridge of textile storytelling

This investigation into an urban bridge of textile storytelling began far from the site, at a social enterprise screenprinting workshop supporting Indigenous artists in Arnhem Land, Bábbarra Designs. The screenprinting and women’s centre revealed a series of undercurrents connecting the site with print culture, in addition to the importance of custodianship and the cooperative use of the land by its traditional owners. Hence unfolded a screenprinting centre in which visitors and locals can engage in storytelling through collective making and designing, alongside a population of small business and social enterprises. The mechanics of the screenprinting process similarly structures the circular distribution of programmes, as the user, visitor or worker transitions through regions dedicated to design, preparation, printing, finishing, purchase and exhibition, from the restored wetland ground plane ascending to a printmaking bridge level roofed with a projection space and Murnong meadow. The language of Victorian industrial architecture was influential, in addition to silkscreen technology, and the density, materiality and expansiveness of a wetland environment. A pivoting outer skin is animated with fabrics for exhibition and information, tactile elements that are hooked and hoisted into place. Within the arch, the language of timber – as skeletal frame and planar platform – weaves amidst the wetland, whilst textile lanterns trace periscope-like observation decks from the screenprinting engine-room above in a mismatched, kimono-sleeve geometry.

In this way, a journey into visualising cultural storytelling unspools from a wetland, exploring the medium of textile screenprinting as a productive vehicle for deep social and cultural connection in the form of a kinetic and densely screened, mass timber urban bridge.