Photography by Satu Miettinen

Fashion Design by Melanie Sarantou

Something is unsettling about the forgotten spaces. The cattle station shed was one of them—a place where dust clung like a second skin and the sun peeled the paint off rusted hinges. Hidden inside was an old trunk. And inside that trunk, an archive: women’s personal wear, maybe from the 1960s, left behind without a name, without a story. Forgotten. Of no use.

Whom these garments belonged to, no one knows. Their owners could have been workers, daughters, matriarchs—women whose lives slipped between the cracks of the official records, surviving only through the intimate wear of cloth against skin. Each piece bore silent witness to a life lived: stretched seams, fraying straps, a small mend along a waistband. They weren’t just garments; they were relics of resilience.

I took these fragile pieces into my own hands, not to restore them, but to continue their stories. I embellished them with beads, stitched my own memories into their fabric, layering my experiences over the faded traces of others. My needle didn’t just pass through cloth; it passed through time, piercing together unknown lives with my own.

This is feminist work. Quiet. Intentional. Resistant. In the act of overlaying my memories onto these old undergarments, I reclaimed the practice of subtle inscription—the slow leaving of traces, generation after generation of women marking the world not with declarations, but with presence. The fragility of the textile mirrored the fragility of memory itself: delicate, yet powerful enough to cross decades.

Rajamailla, or Borderlands, is about that meeting place—where my story brushes against theirs, where identities are borrowed, blended, and left open for the next woman who dares to pick up the thread. In a world obsessed with permanence and power, this is an act of impermanence, a soft rebellion. An inheritance made not of wealth, but of traces.

And sometimes, the smallest stitch can carry the loudest memory.

When I asked Chat GPT to co-create the text with me, it gave me the above version on my prompt (written in about 2 minutes). Here is my prompt:

“Create a blog text for the title ‘Borderlands’, a feminist perspective on using old 1960s underwear found in a trunk forgotten in a cattle station shed in the outback of Australia. No one knows who these garments belong to. I have used these old garments, embellished them with beads, and stitched my memories into the cloth of the old garments. Hence, overlaying my memories over the traces of wear I found in the garments. The fragility of the textile and the way we reinscribe our own identities on something borrowed as a feminist approach to leave subtle traces to generation after generation of women.”

My reflections:

Needless to say, heavy editing was needed. Do you think Chat GPT is creative? It may be, but Chat GPT cannot give the time and the creativity to create the garments, the overlay of traces, nor the carefully crafted outcomes that assisted me to cope, deal with and process the news that both my mothers are living with dementia. It is for the two mothers in my life that I have created and whom I will continue to create. Our hands and our embodied lived realities create the traces and the layers of memories. Not our MTH AIs. However, AI can help sketch a possible scenario of how it may have been back then, right? Well, see Ken Fischer’s comment!

Ken Fischer’s reflections:

It reminds me of your exhibition at the Port Pirie Regional Art Gallery, “Have you met my sister?” There were garments discovered in that exhibition. Satu’s photographs were also featured. Have to say the AI response is a bit pedestrian. None of the mystery, the intrigue and the intimacy of the discovery comes across.

NOTE: The AI text was developed in 2025