‘Rematriate’ is a feminist, Indigenous reimagining of the word “repatriate,” intentionally disrupting colonial language to recentre matriarchal knowledge, care, and cultural continuity. Through large scale woven banners and textile installations, Jessika Spencer expands her weaving practice into immersive acts of cultural resistance and renewal.

Working with secondhand textiles, raffia and naturally dyed materials, Spencer draws on weaving as both ancestral practice and contemporary craft activism. The labour intensive process of stitching, knotting, repairing, and binding becomes a political gesture, asserting the value of women’s work, cultural maintenance, and intergenerational knowledge systems often dismissed within colonial histories of art and design.

‘Rematriate’ considers what it means to reclaim cultural space through making: to hold memory within fibre, to honour Indigenous women’s practices, and to imagine futures grounded in sustainability and sovereignty.

Through fibre and textile installation, ‘Rematriate’ speaks to survival, protest, healing, and the ongoing rematriation of culture back into Indigenous hands.

Image: Jessika Spencer, 2025, Natural and Studio Dyed Raffia, Hair, Fishing Line, Wood, 140 x 75cm,.