‘Nest’ is about my dealing with notions of ‘home’ and making art, identities, and home. After experiencing immigration and moving away from my beloved Namibia, themes of seeking new groundedness and identity have dominated my creative practices. ‘Nest’ is one of the expressions that deals with these themes, especially now that I travel, work, and live between extreme margins, from Outback Australia to the Arctic North.

I have spent most of my career moving away from design towards artistic and improvisatory processes due to fears of the planned and restricted. I have become addicted to the making in the moment and the possibilities it offers. Yet, I cannot remove myself from planning and conceptualisation either. It is always there, sneaking in, finding, and creating order – maybe not always simultaneously. Still, it comes back: the analytical to sort out the anarchical mess, working in tandem, yet also not. I get obsessed with ‘worlds’ of analysis or impulsive/intuitive making. Then, sometimes, to make it come together, I find peace between these two ‘sides’ and find harmony, a conclusion, a way forward or backwards.

Nests are such a process. Thoughts slowly process as we dream and live. We create rhizomes that come together to form something else, made one day. When I plan, I tend to dislike the process because it stalls my journey and instils fear. The process was a kind of soul-searching about the meaning of my ‘nest’ (home, love, belonging, life, work, place), my environment, my future, and past. The felted textiles I thought ‘just happened’; however, the nests formed through many rhizomes that grew from thoughts, actions, and events. Then, somehow, they started to grow and knot together, like a nest, to make ‘Nest’.

There is another story entangled in the history of ‘Nest’. In 2014, a nine-year-old boy who saw me weave seaweed one day brought me a bird’s nest. He told me that he saw me make nests (the weaving I was working on) and that is why he wants to give me the bird’s nest (not that I thought of my weaving as nests at that stage, but subconsciously I was processing thoughts about home and what constitutes home for me for several years). I was surprised when I looked closer and found that the nest was woven from trash the birds had found in their environment, including human waste. Plastic, plastic rope and fibre, trashy bits of everything, seaweed, and natural stuff, all were in there!

The nest occupied my mind, as the beauty I see in Australia, my new home, is being trashed (similar to Namibia, my ‘home for always, but never again’). The nest that the boy gave me inspired the purpose of felting ‘Nest’ with natural fibres and environmentally friendly soap. The idea is to take them back to the environment, where birds can use them as materials to build their nests. This idea stems from observing two birds in my patio studio at home who unravelled some of my experimental weaves to harvest materials for their nests. While making some awesome acrobatic moves to access the weaves through the trellises, they frayed the weaves, pulling fibres from them for their own nests.

Melanie Sarantou