Molly Stanko

Bachelor of Fine Arts (Drawing & Printmaking)

Walking into my grandparents’ home, you are greeted with myriad intensely detailed and extravagantly framed 1970s kitsch-style needlepoint tapestries. I associate them with a sense of home and heritage, a safe place, because for me they have always existed on these walls. I harness these intrinsic associations in my work, focusing on the vulnerability of memory reconstruction.

Influenced by personal archives and the labour of needlepoint, I painstakingly represent each stitch with paint. Experienced up close, my work breaks down elementally into an abstract grid of small, flat-coloured oval shapes, but from afar, each dot blends to form a somewhat readable image. There is an ethereal, floating quality that evokes the fragmentary notion of a blurred memory.