Fabric of Belonging: Sangeeta Sandrasegar’s Latest Work Blooms at RESET Festival
Sangeeta Sandrasegar has long been drawn to the quiet power of plants – not only their beauty, but the colours, histories and cultural memories they carry. The Melbourne-based artist weaves together stories of migration and belonging. Her latest creation, ‘I ragazzi dei millefiori: the flow’rs of song and story’, is a luminous textile installation suspended in the Atrium at Fed Square – silk organza and cotton panels naturally dyed in earthy hues, layered with botanical illustrations and archival imagery that invites reflection on the connections between people, place and plants.
The work will be unveiled on the 13th of September in partnership with the Australian Tapestry Workshop at RESET, Fed Square’s free, month-long festival celebrating greener living. The festival runs until 6 October, and celebrates sustainability, creativity and care for the environment. Its vibrant public events program spans toy swaps, eco-discos, repair cafés, a pop-up recycling centre, riverside clean-ups, outdoor cinema, craft workshops, expert talks and more. No matter the Melbourne weather, RESET offers playful, meaningful ways for people of all ages to reconnect with community and with nature.
Sangeeta’s installation is one of the festival’s highlights, referencing the Millefiori Tapestry of Pistoia, early 20th-century Italian flower sellers in Melbourne, and the long histories of plant dyes across cultures. We caught up with her to talk about the threads of inspiration, colour and memory that continue to shape her practice.
Images: Supplied
Hi Sangeeta! Can you tell us a bit about ‘I ragazzi dei millefiori: the flow’rs of song and story’?
Several overlapping stories come together in this piece. Last year I spent three months in Prato, Italy as an artist in residence as part of the Monash University Visual Residency program, researching textiles. I became absorbed in a tapestry at the civic museum of Pistoia – the ‘Millefiori’ or ‘Adoration Tapestry’, woven in silk and wool in Flanders in 1500. Against a black ground it blooms with countless plants, leaves, fruits, flowers, and animals – hares, deer, birds, even a unicorn. The profusion of flowers include dog roses, foxgloves, common daisies, irises, violets, primroses, carnations, bluebells, poppies… The list goes on. Researchers and historians have worked to identify as many specimens as possible. This search for botanical identifications and the tapestry’s elusive provenance drew me in; I loved standing before this remarkable work, its naturally dyed yarns still glowing with colourful exuberance, even after centuries.
At the same time, I visited contemporary manufacturers such as Beste S.p.A, a factory in Prato, Italy producing sustainable cotton fabrics with cutting-edge technology. Seeing AI-assisted production alongside the ‘human eye’ felt like a modern counterpoint to the ancient tapestry. My time in Prato became both a journey in colour and through time and space.
It was then that Fed Square and the Australian Tapestry Workshop invited me to develop an installation for the Atrium, expanding on my projects with master dyer Heather Thomas exploring plants in the new Melbourne Arts Precinct garden. Slowly, this new green space embedded into our expanding museum and theatre facilities and a centuries-old garden depicted in a tapestry began to weave themselves together. I started tracing a trail between my travels in Prato to my place in Melbourne.
You were also inspired by the flower sellers of Princes Bridge…
A poignant narrative sprang out while I was researching Fed Square. I learnt of young Italian boys who sold flowers along Princes Bridge and Flinders Street Station in the early 1900s. These boys appear to have been contracted by other (often quite young) migrant men whose names are listed in housing records around Carlton and North Melbourne. One in particular, Angelo Russo from Malfa, Sicily, was himself only about 16. I was surprised to read of this stage of Italian migration: at the turn of the last century and with the White Australia policy to become legislation in 1901. The ensuing racial policies would restrict people from southern European countries such as Italy, Greece, and Spain; and the newspaper records of the time often conflated differing cultural backgrounds with ignorance.
There is little remaining evidence of those young lives. What has been recorded relays a tough existence: brawls and scuffles between gangs of boys fighting for their living. Stories of a young flower seller stabbed by a fishmonger; another aged 18 who ended his own life. These boys were itinerant vendors, selling their posies against the law and to the fury of many of the legal stall holders around Princes Bridge and Flinders Street. Who were they? Which Italian cities did they come from? And what about their families?
The title of this work is part Italian and part English language. ‘I ragazzi dei millefiori’ literally translates to ‘the boys of the thousand flowers’ and as such contains the reference back to the ‘thousand flowers’ Millefiori in Pistoia. The English section, ‘the flow’rs of song and story’, comes from a line in the poem ‘The Flower Boys’ by the poet Joan Torrance published in the Herald newspaper in October 1900. Torrance’s poem, alongside other published evidence, points to a reality that these children worked hard, often malnourished and needing to support family members. These fragments of young lives seemed so flimsy and as transient as the flowers they pedalled. The installation takes up the narrative of these young Italian migrants at the turn of the 20th century.
Which materials did you use, and how did everything come together?
An array of natural plant colourants create the canvas of colours presented in the work, which ranges across orange, red and pink. I worked with Heather Thomas to create this spectrum from madder, sappanwood, weld, marigold, goldenrod, cutch, peppermint gum, silver wattle and black wattle. The fabrics are locally sourced silk and a fine quality cotton, generously donated by Beste S.p.A.
The materials I work with are consciously chosen for their cultural or historical connection to the particular themes being explored in the piece. This installation is an ode to some of the lives that have striven and continued to thrive in this place. It is a gesture to these young boys who travelled so far at the turn of the last century, like many of the plants they sold. As such, I wanted a major component of the material the work was made upon to come from Italy. The portraits of the flower seller boys are painted onto the panels of the Beste fabric. What I also like about this particular fabric is that global travel is literally woven into its structure: the fibre comes from the USA, the spinning in India, and the finishing in Italy. Across the portraits of the boys and the depictions of flowers (in the silk panels) derived from designs in the tapestry at Pistoia, the installation celebrates the ongoing relationship between Australia and Italy, of past and present, of peoples and plants.
The materials I work with are consciously chosen for their cultural or historical connection to the particular themes being explored in the piece. This installation is an ode to some of the lives that have striven and continued to thrive in this place.
How do plants and colour carry cultural memory and transformation?
Plants – their leaves, flowers and roots – have unexpectedly implanted themselves in my work for the past several years. It began with wanting to understand how the pigments and paints we take for granted were developed. This led me to the production of colour from plants, insects and minerals, which were the main source of colour production before the developments of synthetic colour around the early 1900s and beyond. Following this path, I began to see that colour – one of the essential tools of an artist – was caught up in an intricate matrix. These early hues reflect and resonate complex patterns of trans-continental trade, colonial agriculture, enterprises based on slavery, revolutions in industry, European rivalries and political relations.
Following the trail of natural blue – woad in Europe, indigo in India – led me to Heather in Australia. Since then, we have collaborated on many projects. Heather has been my guide to the world of natural colour, derived from mordants mixed with colourants from plant material. We make work that, for me, speaks to the journey of particular hues. Colour travels the globe metaphorically and practically. It has enraptured people and trapped them in trade and commerce as much as the clothes and fabrics that were made by and for them. Flowers and plants were a central component of this trade in colour. When Heather and I began working together, I was tracing the colonial arc of Indian indigo to create an installation that spoke to the landscape of the TarraWarra Museum of Art. Heather introduced me to various native plants that create glorious yellow hues. Across the blues of indigo and native yellows we created a landscape of blues and greens and golden light that reflected upon the many journeys of migration and settlement around the Yarra Valley. We have continued working together since then, using plants to create colour.
Colour travels the globe metaphorically and practically. It has enraptured people and trapped them in trade and commerce as much as the clothes and fabrics that were made by and for them.
Curious about natural dyes? This eco-printed ballgown went all in!
What does this piece mean to you?
The project carries on my work with diaspora communities, especially from our Australian context. My father was an Indian-Malaysian and my mother is of Swiss-Anglo Australian heritage. As a child the family lived between Malaysia and Australia. This early awareness of migration and change is fundamental to me as an artist. I am concerned with narratives that lie adjacent to historical canons: to understand the people and places caught in-between definitions, or hidden within someone else’s story. Through my works, I evolve a continuous narrative centred upon the relationships between migrant communities to their homelands, and life in Australia.
It is in many ways a garden that celebrates the cultural diversity that has long grown up here, that has struggled and survived.
While I was in Italy, a foreigner from Australia, I started thinking about the hardships of these boys whose lives were surrounded by and dependent upon flowers. What must they have endured? I stood in front of the embroidered flowers of the tapestry in Pistoia, and I wondered what flowers they might have sold? Where these children may have ended up? What the future garden embedded in the Melbourne Arts Precinct would be growing? This will be a special garden, focusing on plants that can survive the harsh heat of our summers, and our arid winters. It will house plants sourced and trialled from around the world, which can grow in combination with the native plants that are best suited for our Melbourne weather and soils. It is in many ways a garden that celebrates the cultural diversity that has long grown up here, that has struggled and survived.
Standing under this garden of saturated colour I hope people will want to engage with the various narratives and threads that sit behind this piece. That in this manner each person may consider the nuances of historical migrations and the reverberations that each one of us carry as we move through our world.
