Natural Artist: Elisa Jane Carmichael - Harper's BAZAAR November 2021

Ngugi artist Elisa Jane Carmichael draws inspiration from Country and works closely with her mother and sister to revive and preserve traditional artmaking techniques — with a contemporary spin

The Primavera 2021: Young Australian Artists exhibition, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney’s annual celebration of artists aged 35 and younger, has been delayed three times. But Elisa Jane “Leecee” Carmichael, one of the five artists involved, isn’t complaining. The past year has given her a chance to spend more time with her work and has layered it with new meaning: as Carmichael was starting the piece in early 2020, her adored grandmother passed away. Now, as she prepares to exhibit it finally, she’s weeks away from giving birth to her first child.

“Having things pushed back allowed more time to be more grounded and a bit more still,” Carmichael says on the phone from her home in Brisbane. “It’s been a beautiful thing to have some time to relax into growing a human and experimenting with art and also be allowed the proper time to grieve.”

Carmichael is a multidisciplinary artist from the Ngugi people of Quandamooka Country: the people of the land and sea around Moreton Bay in south-east Queensland. Her heritage and identity form not only the conceptual side of her work but also the physical. Her sister, Freja, a curator, was working at the Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) when she discovered woven baskets from Quandamooka among the gallery’s collection. Their mother then started researching and learning traditional weaving techniques and passing on her knowledge to her daughters. “They were sharing the things they were learning and really inspired me to go on this creative path with weaving practices,” Carmichael says. Until that point, she’d been a painter, but is now dedicated to working with her mother and sister to nurture and preserve the techniques of their ancestors.

While weaving is now Carmichael’s primary medium, she also works with large-scale cyanotypes. An early form of photography, cyanotypes involve placing objects onto a piece of chemical-coated fabric and exposing it to the sun. The result is a kind of reverse photograph. The objects create negative space, almost a photonegative, but on a piece of deep Prussian-blue fabric four metres wide instead of a tiny strip of transparent brown plastic. She combines brightly coloured weaving and deeply pigmented cyanotypes in a process she refers to as painting with shadows. “I’m really inspired by the way materials from Country, and our weaves can create their own lines and their own marks on the fabric,” she explains. Her cyanotypes express life on North Stradbroke Island, with shells, leaves, turtle tracks and lapping waves all leaving traces on the material as it lays on the shore, soaking up the sun’s brilliant light.

Carmichael isn’t sure if she’ll be able to see her Primavera piece in the gallery, partly because of the pandemic border restrictions and partly because her baby is due two weeks before the exhibition’s opening. But she’s hopeful. “Because of the scale and the intricacy of the work, it really needs to be seen in person,” she says. Titled a search for meaning is to absorb the abundance of beauty in nature, it comprises an intricately woven net covered with shimmering fish scales suspended above a large (4.5-metre by 2.8-metre) cyanotype. It’s not a work that can be fully appreciated through an online exhibition. “I’m adapting to the new way of showing your work, but I miss meeting new artists and being able to come together and have a yarn,” she says. Here’s hoping.

This article originally appeared in the November 2021 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR. Photographed by Louis Lim. Courtesy of the artist and Onespace Gallery.