Sienna Barton — 'The Gift', 2026 Beaded Textile Vessel

This beaded vessel is an imitation of the artist's existing textile practice. The piece features coloured beads that inject colour but also imitate the original form's organically created stitches, and plays with concepts of simulation and replicas. Standing at a distance, you might not notice that it features so many beads - like looking at an impressionist painting from afar, only to see that it's made of many tiny marks. Spanning dozens of hours of work, this piece seeks to interrogate the preciousness of "women's work" and the value of the handmade in a world where so much is automated or artificial (including intelligence).

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Sienna Barton is a Naarm-based painter and textile artist. Freshly graduating from the MFA program at RMIT University, her artistic practice is obsessive and time-consuming. Often serving as a means of soothing fidgety fingers, her work seeks to transform anxious energy into tangible works of art. She’s currently focusing on craft as a radical act of self-care, while trying to understand her relationship to colour: why pink features so prolifically and why red makes her cringe. Her textile works utilise discarded materials from local clothing labels and her own wardrobe, while others are collected by her grandparents during their weekly trips to the op shop. It’s a true labour of love, and each thread has an embodied history.

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Material: collected and discarded fabrics, new and vintage threads, collected and new beads

Dimensions: approx. 15 x 17cm