Medium: Paper textile wall piece
Materials: Dyed paper, reclaimed lace, thread, plywood.
Dimensions: 100cm diameter.
Commissioned by Artspace Mackay, Dr Karike Ashworth was invited to work with local women over a two-week period to explore the concept of ‘domestic space’ or ‘the domestic’ or ‘the home’, and who gets to be safe within it. Drawing on her own lived experience of family violence, the group created a warm, generative space of gentle conversation and care fostered by a creative community of making and learning.
Each day, the group walked together, foraging rusty objects from around metropolitan Mackay—fragments of the domestic and industrial past and present, worn by time and rot. They mapped their significant places via Google Earth and brought personal items, including photographs and documents, into the process.
These images were copied, manipulated, printed and eco-dyed using local plants, found materials and objects, and tea brewed during shared conversations. Once sun-dried and ironed, the papers were communally cut into strips and then carefully woven by the lead artist into this circular configuration. Woven through the piece are the stories, memories, and lived experiences shared across the two weeks—fragments of individual lives and their traumas connected through conversation, recognition, and care.
The circular form evokes a bird’s-eye view, a topographical map, or a trauma lens—reflecting how lived experience can shape one’s perception of place and safety, and how connection can bear witness to that understanding.
Domestic Topography (1 in 4) is held in the Artspace Mackay collection.
Rust Walk, 2025
Medium: Installation
Materials: Rusted metal fragments collected from metropolitan Mackay over two weeks.
Dimensions: 180cm x 80cm
Rust Walk presents a curated assemblage of rusted objects collected during our daily walks through Mackay—remnants of domestic, industrial, and incidental life. Contained within a vitrine, the fragments are arranged with rhythm and care, drawing attention to their varied forms, textures, and past functions. This presentation transforms debris into artefact, encouraging close looking and reflection. Together, the objects form a layered material record—mapping the traces of place, memory, labour, and time.
Home (2025)
Following the two-week residency at Artspace Mackay in February 2025, Brisbane-based artist Dr Karike Ashworth returned to Mackay to present Home, an exhibition co-curated with Artspace that explored the domestic space as both refuge and rupture. At its centre was Domestic Topography (1 in 4), a new work developed in response to unsafe situations in the home. Alongside this, selected works from the gallery’s collection opened conversations about safety, care, power, fear, memory, silence, and love.
Drawing on personal experience and deep listening, the audio reflections that accompany Home engage with each collection work not as a standalone artwork but as emotional landscape—inviting audiences to consider who gets to be safe in the home, and what happens when that safety is compromised. Themes of matrilineal care, broken homes, hidden histories, and intergenerational trauma surfaced again and again. Some works are playful, others haunting; some speak directly, others whisper quietly.
Home was comforting, but also complex. This exhibition didn’t offer resolution, but instead held space for feeling, for reckoning, for looking again at the structures we live within.