Brenda Goggs, Medieval is not old, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.
Brenda Goggs
Gallery 3
Opening Thursday 19 February, , 2026, 6-8pm
Friday 20 February - Sunday 15 March
In Holding up the Sky, Brenda recalls the children’s story about Chicken Little asking the question whether the sky is falling in. The ending is rather ambiguous depending on which version you heard as a child.
Weaving is like holding up the sky. You start from the bottom and aim for the clouds. It's like history, where facts and fictions hold up our understanding of what it means to belong in a colonised country like Australia. Tapestry itself takes on an authority given to it by the structure and the process and its historic past, so it is important to keep asking questions, even small ones.
Taking well-known Australian 'icons' like our Sunburnt Country (from Dorothea Mackellar) or order and harmony (from George Raper's colonial painting) or iconic architecture (like the Renzo Piano building in Sydney), this work takes a new look at old assumptions in the form of woven tapestry.
Each tapestry is accompanied by a poem, which reflecting the idea of 'voice' in interpreting our cultural understanding and using words to think about pictures.
About the Artist
Brenda Goggs has a foot in two worlds as a practising Visual Artist and former teacher of English. Exhibiting woven tapestry over the past 25 years, she has focused on Australian identity and the landscape as an ‘object’ in an imperial ‘cabinet of curiosities’ and during this time has witnessed a national shift towards a search for understanding of our colonial past and our culpability in a quest for ownership.
She is excited by connections between things, where art and literature, words and pictures collide and where everyday moments reveal the sublime, just for a moment. She insists that the world continues to be a place of wonder, even in the suburbs, and even when things go wrong. These ambiguities provided the inspiration for her first published poetry collection Cracks in the Path, (Ginninderra Press, 2025), about living in the national capital surrounded by the public monuments which frame suburban life.
As a visual artist, Brenda has interrogated literature and interpreted work by Gerald Murnane, Patrick White and David Malouf, and collaborated with poets Geoff Page and Alan Gould.