Backpack

Backpack captures one of the adult fears of being homeless: that we can neither shelter nor protect our children, however much we try and whatever cost we are prepared to accept as parents.

Inspired by a poem written by award-winning WA author and poet Renée Pettitt-Schipp, a child’s backpack, immersed in the Mandurah estuary for three months and filled with sand and flotsam, anchors the reader’s eye and heart to the the reality of so many children, lacking basic shelter and protection in their country of origin, whose lives are lost or torn apart.

Installation materials include digitally printed cotton, embroidery thread, recycled packaging materials, branded backpack, sand, scavenged toys from beaches on Christmas Island.