Dry Your Dishes on my Culture was the name of Kait James’s first solo exhibition, which took place at the Koorie Heritage Trust in 2019. At that time, we were both very much emerging into our practices – Kait as an artist and myself as a curator – and it was the first exhibition that we worked on together. Like many of Kait’s works, the provocative title of the show holds a double meaning. It reads almost like a dare to the audience, tempting them to disrespect the artist and her Wadawurrung culture, while hinting towards the artworks made from reclaimed and reappropriated vintage tea towels. In the title, Kait pinpoints the absur- dity of living in a colonised society with a white supremacy problem that treats First Peoples as objects and our cultures as token, something to be profited off and adorn the handles of their ovens with.

The install crew and I shared many laughs as we took each work out of its bubble wrap, inspecting the intricately hand-em- broidered words and motifs, their brightly-coloured threads interrupting and changing the meaning of the imagery on the tea towel underneath. These assertions from Kait, often bring humour and hard truths to the otherwise homogenised and fetishised imagery of First Peoples cultures – shields, bark paintings, spears, native animals and plants, often surrounding nude figures in front of rock escarpments or campfires. Kait’s wit, as sharp as the needle used to puncture the surface of the cotton, is embedded all through these works and jests at the absurdity of the images – and why on earth they exist on a tea towel. This exhibition was an indicator of Kait’s emerging visual language and prolific material practice, and several works were acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria – no small feat for a first solo show.

When you look closely at Kait’s works on reclaimed tea towels, you’ll notice that most nod to the era in which the original tea towel was distributed. In Advance Australia Not Fair (2019), Kait repurposes a tea towel made in 1984. This was the year that, after over ten years of polling, a failed competition and far too much singing of ‘God Save the Queen’, Governor-General Ninian Martin Stephen announced our nation’s anthem as we know it today. Kait conveys this moment in history by embroidering the words ‘NOT FAIR’ in hot pink and neon green thread next to the Australian flag. She nods to one of her art icons, Keith Haring, by including iconography the artist used while visiting Australia, for his 1984 Moomba festival poster and fashion parade. Like Haring’s edition of the Moomba poster, Kait puts particular focus on a few sets of bum cheeks. I can’t help but wonder if someone told Haring the rumours of Uncle Bill Onus bestowing the name Moomba on the festival, and the various interpretations of the truth behind its name. If you know a little about the words shared between the Wad- awurrung, Taungurung and other Kulin groups, you’d know that moom means bottom. Festival organisers, believing ‘moomba’ to mean ‘coming together to celebrate’ (which is said to come from language groups in New South Wales), didn’t clock the multiple translations. And so Uncle Bill, having witnessed the festival exclude and exploit First Peoples for many years, endorsed this most apt name, translating in the eyes and hearts of many a Koorie to ‘up your arse’.

In an attempt to even the unfair playing field, Kait embraces the cheeky larrikin spirit behind how Moomba got its name. She uses language to subvert, challenge and poke fun at the white majority who pick and choose elements of culture to consume, appropriate or dispose of. Kait will often use ‘Aussie’ slang and colloquialisms, double entendre and puns, alongside the language names for places and acronyms with new meanings, to interrogate our sense of nationhood and contemporary culture.

Kait works with a diversity of textile materials – wool for knitting and tufting, needlework for stitching and, in more recent experimentations, ceramic sculpture, public art and felted flags. Her practice includes anything she can make with her own two hands. Kait trained as a photographer but admits that digital media just wasn’t for her. I imagine how empowering and cathartic it must be to stitch over derogatory images with the words ‘Sovereignty Never Ceded’, place ‘C ▼ ▼ T’ under a portrait of Captain Cook or replace national shit-talker Peter Dutton’s face with an anus. It is a kind of personal revenge, a reclamation of images and language and an expression of her humour in the face of such blatant degradation and racism. I imagine Kait chuckling with each stitch.

Interrogating what ‘Australia’ really is, and how the Australian identity has been imagined and constructed through images created by colonisers, is something that many First Peoples artists do. The hand-painted ceramics by Brownie Downing, and other kitschy objects made by non-Indigenous people, can be found in most vintage shops and are even more commonly found in the homes of Aboriginal people – despite their racist overtones. These depictions have been reclaimed by artists including the late Destiny Deacon – the matriarch of Koorie Kitsch – as well as Tony Albert, Karla Dickens and many more who salvage these items from the depths of dusty second-hand stores. Again, it is the absurdity of their existence that draws us to them, a resistance to becoming object, and, as Destiny Deacon once said, there is ‘a laugh and a tear’ in each image.1

For her solo exhibition Red Flags, Kait has cast and recreated various new ceramic works depicting replicas of a found object: the nude figure of an Aboriginal girl. She has placed a flag in the hands of each figure, each flag with a different acronym on it. WTF (meaning White Trash Fascists) stands out, as though the figure is questioning her own existence and asking the audience, ‘Is this what you reallythink of me?’ By using the imagery and language of the coloniser, and applying it through her lens as an Aboriginal woman, Kait, like many of the artists before her, undermines the legitimacy of these images. She pokes fun at the stereotypes and brings the power back into the hands of the people who have been wrongly depicted. In doing so, Kait breathes new life and new meaning into each piece, and defies any sense of nationhood.

Earlier in 2024, Kimberley Moulton and I curated The Blak Infinite, a project that explored First Peoples connections to the cosmos, political constellations and futures. The project was installed across Federation Square for RISING festival, and three of Kait’s pieces were exhibited in light boxes along Swanston Street, bringing her work out of a gallery and into the public space – much like her 2024 Art Tram and her 193-panel work that wraps the façade of Geelong Arts Centre. Each day, thousands of people would engage with Kait’s work, proudly positioned on the steps of Federation Square. School children would eat their lunches atop the lightboxes, taking in their subversive messages, and during the evenings visitors were lit by the yellow glow from each striking work. Alienation (2021), which features Haring-like figures being beamed-up by an alien spaceship, and Take Me to Your Weaver (2022), which features the face of an alien demanding to be taken to the leader, were included in the display.

As a Wadawurrung artist, Kait pays homage to her lineage and the art- makers in her family, saying that if aliens were to invade she would take them to the Wadawurrung master weaver, her cousin Tammy Gilson, as she believes that it is the weavers who hold the knowledge in our communities. When I think about weaving – how each weave is made, how the placement of each stitch tells a story, each maker’s personal and familial flare and the materials sourced and used – I can see the similarities between this practice and the work that Kait makes. I can see the natural connection between those old ways and what is being created now by the many artists and cultural keepers in our communities.

Kait’s works show contemporary Koorie culture, which is not limited to the narrow stereotypes derived from colonial vision- ing of what First Peoples cultures look like. In Kait’s world, Aboriginal culture is inclusive of playing video games, listen- ing to David Bowie, upholding First Peoples sovereignty and spotting UFOs above cityscapes. As our cultures continue to evolve, our artists are the ones who show us all the possibilities for the future – and Kait is someone who shows a vibrant and expansive future indeed.

1. Destiny Deacon, cited in Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser, ‘Not much of a soul to bare’ in Destiny Deacon: Walk + Don’t Look
Blak, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2004, pp. 108–10.
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