Frances Castles is a Kamilaroi artist who has been creating art with The Torch since 2017. Below is an excerpt from Variations: A More Diverse Picture of Contemporary Art by Tristen Harwood, Grace McQuilten and Anthony White.

My first experience with artmaking occurred in Walgett, New South Wales, where my grandmother used to teach me how to weave when I was around ten or eleven, back in the early ’70s. It was the small town where I grew up. My grandmother at this stage was living in Coonamble and she used to go back and forth from Coonamble to Walgett to visit and just to take me to the river where the grasses grew. And she taught me the right grasses to pick and how to dry them out and weave them – she was a very good inspiration and influence on me at that stage.

I do a lot of basket-weaving through The Torch. They’ve really encouraged me to do it, to put my skills out there, and I’ve been able to sell the baskets, which has been good. As my weaving has developed over the years, the weaves have gotten a lot neater. I take inspiration from baskets we used for picking and collecting and ceremonial baskets.

When I’m weaving it sort of transcends me back to a simpler time and lifespan where I could just sit down by a river and weave and learn different things. Today everything is rushed. It’s hard to describe, but I like to put my whole spirit and soul into what I’m doing, to create my work.

I weave a variety of designs and patterns: round, oval and diamond shapes. I make river turtles if I can. All different – and I incorporate emu feathers with them. My grandmother showed me how to do a spirit wheel to add to a basket. At the moment I haven’t got access to grasses for weaving, so I use raffia.

I also do a lot of knitting and I’ve made a blanket, which was in one of the The Torch’s Confined exhibitions. I used a lot of different colours to represent the different Aboriginal nations throughout the country and I had the flag in the middle of it. I’d like to just represent what this country is.

It’s hard to explain how I want people to look at my baskets. I want people to enjoy them and to get a sense of what this country is and what the culture is really about. And I’ve taught quite a lot of young Indigenous girls – actually in prison – to weave. A couple of them have gone on to show their artwork through The Torch.

It makes me feel good to pass on my skills, because it shows that Indigenous art is thriving. Our culture here in this country has been suppressed for so long. We need to put it out there for the whole world to see, without prejudice.

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