Emerging Series

Gathering the Wings of our Grandmothers

mixed media textile: embroidered thread drawing, eco-dyed recycled fabrics, tulle, jute, thread, wire

115 x 77 x 15 cm

Juliet uses freehand machine embroidery to create textile based mixed media artworks that explore themes relating to the female body, identity and experience. She uses a process based approach, manipulating the narrative potential of her materials to explore feminist ideas and concepts. In this artwork, depicting a woman gathering scapulae (shoulder blades) and feathers, Juliet is playing with the concept of “standing on the shoulders of giants’ to examine an alternate perspective to history’s relationship to the present in which ‘gathering’ and ‘holding lightly’ become important. Focusing on moments of transition, she explores the interwoven contexts and forces at play in the production of female identity including our relationship to domesticity; cultural roots; medical knowledge/practices; and the natural world.

Uncharted

Mixed media: fabric, embroidered thread, maps, floor sweepings

80 x 80 x 1 cm

Maps have always captivated Juliet: as much for their visual qualities and practical use as for their symbolic meanings. For her, they are a rich metaphor for the structures humans create to organise, navigate, and make sense of an unpredictable, evolving world.
Collins grew up in Scotland, where the land is charted in detailed Ordnance Survey maps. Walking the hills with her Dad, she learned to read these maps while developing a deep love for her homeland. In her early twenties she left Scotland and eventually settled in Australia. Though her migration story is one of privilege and opportunity, it carries a quiet burr of sadness, loss, and an enduring sense of displacement. Her work reflects on this tension—on how places remain within us even after we have moved away.
As well as speaking to memory and place, Uncharted is also about leaning into chaos and the unknown. Though we may try to understand and control our worlds, there is much we do not know, and sometimes we must simply let go.
Made with freehand embroidery, found fabrics, maps and floor sweepings, the work embodies paradox—unstitching and breaking apart while also mending and re-stitching into something new.

Untethered (I am Multitudes)

embroidred thread, reclaimed fabrics, found objects

130 x 80 cm

In this artwork Juliet explores the layered entangled and ever changing relationship of identity, memory, history, and female experience. She combines freehand machine embroidery, hand stitching, found fabrics, maps, and collected materials to create a textile-based mixed media work that reflects on the multitudes that exist within us and their tentacular nature.
Identity is considered as relational rather than self contained. The non-linear gathering of memory, inherited histories, bodies and places existing in contstant entanglement.
Threads extend, tangle, unravel, and reconnect, echoing the ways we are shaped through our connections and disconnections to others, to place, to our lived experience and to the natural world. Embedded within the work is the understanding that we humans are not separate from nature, but part of its cycles of growth, decay, adaptation, and regeneration.
Threads become acts of repair and rupture at once: stitching to mend, unstitching the barriers, and re-forming identity through cycles of breaking apart and becoming. Through this process-led approach, the artwork embodies paradox — strength in fragility; healing through decay; and how fragmentation brings growth and reconstruction. Juliet invites viewers to consider identity as something that is continually in motion.