Projects

Curator’s Statement- Meaghan Shelton

CrossXpollinatioN Retrospective 2026, Colac Otway Performing Arts and Cultural Centre

‍CrossXpollinatioN has its genesis in craft: the intelligence of the hand, the accumulated knowledge embedded in material, the long game and its undervalued histories of making reclaimed and recentered. At the Colac Otway Performing Arts and Cultural Centre, where craft and fine art interweave as a matter of institutional conviction, this biennale festival of textile and fibre art has become a world-class event with its roots deep in community. CrossXpollinatioN is a program that refuses to allow the polarisation of one approach by another.

I first came to CrossXpollinatioN as a participating artist, pre-selected for the 2022 iteration under the theme Impermanence. Such recognition at that stage of my practice was paramount, as it confirmed that the trans-disciplinary work I had been developing — across painting, textiles, sculpture, and crocheted and woven wire forms — was legible and valued within a serious fibre and textile arts context. When the invitation came to return as one of the Feature Artists for CrossXpollinatioN 2024, under the theme Secrets, the recognition deepened. Both moments have mattered not only to my exhibition career but to the development of my creative practice-led PhD research, where the relationship between making, feminist craft traditions, and embodied knowledge sits at the heart of the inquiry. To have that practice acknowledged and platformed by a program of this calibre provided a form of external validation that no institutional framework alone can offer.

It is in that spirit that I approach the curatorial role, together with Sue Ferrari, for Retrospective, with both gratitude and genuine investment. CrossXpollinatioN 2026 brings together practitioners whose work takes seriously the proposition that materiality is not a vehicle for meaning, but its very site. The cross-pollinations at the heart of this program are not metaphorical: they happen in the junctures between quilting and painting, wire-working and textile techniques, and where fibre meets form. The artists featured do not abandon their own material vocabularies in these encounters. They discover within them new pressures and new possibilities.

This retrospective is an opportunity to look both back and forward simultaneously, to feel into the temporal aspects of making. Looking back, we trace the evidence of exchange — in formal decisions, in unexpected material choices, in the meeting point between works that arrived at the same gesture from entirely different traditions. Looking forward, we ask what CrossXpollinatioN continues to make possible: what communities of practice it sustains, what conversations it keeps alive, what creative scope it opens for artists willing to work at the edges of their own disciplines. That is precisely what makes this a meaningful opportunity — not merely to document what has been, but to imagine, through the evidence of past exchange, what might yet be made.

That forward orientation owes everything to the creative community of Colac, who refused to let this program slip through the cracks during a difficult period of institutional change. The continuity of CrossXpollinatioN is not accidental. It is the result of sustained advocacy, loyalty and collective will on the part of artists, supporters and community members who understand what would be lost if this program ceased. There is a sense of renewal in presenting this retrospective now — a recognition that what has been tended through difficult times emerges not diminished, but with renewed purpose. This exhibition is, among other things, an act of acknowledgement — and a declaration of intent. Viva CrossXpollinatioN 2028!

In recognition and gratitude to the Colac Makers’ Space, Colac Otway Shire and International Venue Group.

Co-curators: Sue Ferrari and Meaghan Shelton. Words by Meaghan Shelton, PhD Graduand