Meeting women from the edges of the world is an empowering experience. After travelling through time and space from Finnish Lapland to Southern Australia, it was a pleasure to meet, get to know and work together with the local Australian and Torres Strait Islander traditional weavers.

After all the anticipation and waiting, the power of artmaking and working with our hands brought us together. Our project group has been preparing for the project for almost a year. Now, working together in action and using artistic tools to share life stories was an important milestone.

We used an artistic ‘Life Mandala’ tool for sharing life stories and narratives. The life stories were captured through visualising essential periods in one’s life through different colours, symbols, drawings and text. Visualisations signify different significant periods or single years in one’s life. Most visualisation starts from the middle of one’s birth and extends into the present moment, like the circles of a year on a tree. The visualisations were painted on round textile canvas and stitched together into an extensive line, creating a three-dimensional spiral that shows how all the life stories form an ecosystem of narratives and are interconnected.

In Fowlers Bay, we are now at the point where these painted life stories are connected, as individual women’s lives are intertwined with each other. Workshop participants focused on visualising their life stories and sharing them. The stories were also documented through video.

The workshop enabled us all to share our life histories and events that had left a mark on us and our behaviours and patterns. It was empowering to hear the stories of the participating women and relate to them. Sharing these stories helped us learn from each other. Visualising one’s life story of history is also a processing and self-reflective tool to understand one’s personal history and position.

The workshop continues tomorrow. It is fascinating to hear, learn and document how the power of a narrative art helps us to share our stories and understand each other and how the ‘Life Mandalas’ develop as a participatory and expressive artistic tool.

By Satu Miettinen

Photo credits: Daria Akimenko