Art Link Magazine Review, Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award 2025

Thank you @artlink_magazine and Una Rey for these encouraging words and for reviewing the Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award @wangarattaartgallery.

The least conventionally beautiful work is Finnish-Australian artist Helvi Apted’s creature-like Felt in Time (2024), suspended from the rafters by its grasping tendrils. Crafted from discarded textiles that look like grey freight blankets, the quasi-garment holds uncanny associations with all kinds of grief and institutional control, establishing its presence as the most vulnerable and daring work: for this there is often no prize.

https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/6130/wangaratta-contemporary-textile-award-2025/

Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award, 2025

I was delighted to be included among the finalists in the Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award, along with my suspended sculpture Felt in Time, 2023

Felt in Time_ is a monolithic textile sculpture that invites the viewer to immerse themselves in care and defence, vulnerability and love. This work is a haunting embodiment of the human form, that could also serve as a defensive shield. The form and materials are inviting, recalling the closeness of one's own body, but they also suggest an awkwardness in intimacy.

The felt used to construct Coat of Arms is manufactured from discarded textiles that have been compressed into a uniform surface. However visible, remnant threads carry the history of many garments, now intertwined in a way that speaks to the commonality of human experience.

https://www.wangarattaartgallery.com.au/Exhibitions/Current-Exhibitions/Wangaratta-Contemporary-Textile-Award-2025

Photo credits: Wangaratta Art Galleryu and Jeremy Weihrauch

Scythia Mini 12: International Exhibition of Mini Textile and Fibre Art, Ukraine June 2025

This year I packed and sent my artwork ‘Alcove (New Beginning)’ 2024, to Ukraine, where it joined over 100 textile based works in the exhibition ‘Scythia Mini 12’.
The 12th International Mini Textile and Fibre Art Exhibition “Scythia”, June 3-17 2015, Ivano-Frankivs’k, Ukraine.

I want to thank the organisers for inviting me to exhibit my work and for creating opportunities for art to be shown and seen in Ukraine while the country is at war, defending itself.

@scythiatextileart

http://scythiatextile.com/mini-2025.html

Skull Studies

Making skulls in wool and felt, based on studies of prehistoric hominin skulls.

I picked up a book from a beach town op-shop about human evolution. It was a 1980s publication full of European archaeologists in beige shorts at dig sites in Africa. I cut out photos showing the remains of various hominids with their big skulls and jaws, and thought about human evolution and how baked in our responses and needs are. This felt and wool skull is about our basic human psychology and need for safety, belonging, food, care and connection. Motivators that continue to shape us from childhood and into our contemporary lives.

Helvi Apted, Skull study, 2024, felt, wool, thread, wood, bracket, 34 x 20 x 25cm, in 'Samples', 8-10 November 2024, Neon Parlour, Thornbury.

R.L. Foote Design Studio Award - Residency

Translating textile experiences into soft clay and ceramic finishes. Part of a residency with R.L Foote Design Studio.

Linden Projects Space : Inter(action)

In this show artists Shannon Slee, Britt Salt and Helvi Apted challenged their distinct studio methodologies by working closely with one another. The result is a suite of new works that collapse the boundaries between the artists’ textile practices - stitches are repeated, forms replicated, and materials shared. The artists gathered material scraps from this process and reassembled them as collaborative works, stretching them over repurposed timber frames that were found in the storeroom of the Handweavers and Spinners Guild, and hard rubbish.

The show includes a basket of fabric 'scraps' in felt that visitors to the gallery are invited to smooth onto felt panels. This adds to an evolving participant addition to the exhibition. 

Alcoves and alter

Exploring the forms of alcoves for meditation and reflection. Photo Tobias Titz

"Thread of my Body, Thread of my Bed", Unassigned Gallery, Brunswick

Curator Phoebe Greaves brought together a textile immersion bedroom experience in her first show “Thread of my Body, Thread of my Bed”. I included two of my soft sculptures, Pink Baby (2013), and Arms and Legs (2023). Here is what Phoeber wrote about the project:

Having recently experienced housing instability, I found myself daydreaming about having my bedroom again, a space that could be mine alone. I spent hours browsing through luxurious linens and decorations, creating moodboards and sketches of the private space I was longing for. I grew to appreciate the intimacy of domestic space, and the way that such a space could be curated and cared for, almost taking on a life of its own.

I aim to extrapolate that idea with this exhibition into a physical manifestation of my “dream space”, equal parts aspirational and surreal, and imbued with the stark intimacy of walking into someone's personal space.

There is a certain feeling you get when you attend a party at the house of someone you barely know, and, in search of a bathroom or kitchen, you accidentally stumble into the host’s bedroom. That is the feeling I aim to replicate with this exhibition. The physical white cube of the gallery transforms into a life laid bare, and, by extension, a psyche laid bare. The intimacy will be confronting, yet, as the viewer moves through the space, this discomfort should morph into something more familiar. The space created by these artists is subjective, and I invite you to reflect upon the following -

Can the body exterior and the domestic interior merge into one?

-Phoebe Greaves, 2024

2023 VCA Grad Show - Coat of Arms

I’m almost* finished the Masters of Contemporary Art degree at VCA… I’ve come to the end of two years of work which has culminated in a series of felt sculptures ‘Coat of Arms’… here are some shots taken during installation, and prior to the final instal lighting

Helvi Apted, ‘Coat of Arms’ (series) (Installation in process), Martyn Myer Arena, Victorian College of the Arts, 2023 Graduate Show.

Exhibition at George Paton Gallery




Helvi Apted | Britt Salt | Shannon Slee

  

From With(in)


13 - 23 March 2023

 

IMAGE: Shannon Slee, Embroidery for Barb. Embroidery on silk, 2022

 

From With(in) presents the work of three artists whose practices are connected by a shared workspace and language of materials, using textile methodologies as a springboard for broader research. The artists invite visitors to take part in textile actions alongside them as they expand, transform and multiply artworks in the gallery over the course of the exhibition.

Curators Izzy Baker and Mia Palmer-Verevis have written a poetic essay together to accompany this exhibition, speaking about the strength and potential that can be achieved when collaborating with others.
Read the full text here.

This exhibition is free to attend and we welcome all skill levels.
13 - 24 March 2023
Monday - Friday, 11am - 5pm
George Paton Gallery
  

Closing Event

Come and join us!
Thursday 23 March, 5 - 7pm, George Paton Gallery
Join the artists and contributors of the current exhibitions From With(in) and Shared Storiesin a closing celebration at the gallery.

This is a free event and all are welcome.

Coat of Arms

My current project takes the Finnish Coat of Arms as a starting point, and works across print, costume and video, working within Australian-Finnish community settings.

Mother art - Work Day

Work in development. June 2022. Screen printed nappies, paper, ladders. Dimensions various.

Photo of an artwork made of nappies and paper that is printed with screen printed images of an abstracted face

Mother art

Work in development. May 2022. Materials: Cotton terry towel and cotton nappies, sign, crayon, masking tape, thumb tacks, foam. Noise generated from embedded breast pump.