EXHIBITION COLLABORATION WITH VESSEL CONTEMPORARY

BE MINDFUL OF OUR ANCESTORS
By Emma-Lee Maher

When I was a kid, I was given a Walker's Luxury Nut & Fruits Chocolate tin packed with loose family documents. Inside were photographs, government records, handwritten notes and photocopied newspaper clippings. Nothing was organised and very little was explained.

The tin became both a weighty inheritance and a source of connection. I was told I was the responsible one, the one who could care for it and make sense of it.


For more than a decade, this tin has lived under my bed, close to my body through different versions of my life. What once felt like evidence for a wound I was still tending has come to feel more like a record of survival.


Through my Artist in Residence Program with Vessel Contemporary I returned to the tin, not to organise it into a neat and authoritative archive or timeline but to continue my relationship with it.


Print making has become a new way of thinking and feeling my way through the archive. Working with photographs, government records and family documents that have been copied, stored, scanned and shared across decades and states. I started to notice the marks left behind, tracing the journeys paper makes through administrative systems, Xerox machines and family hands.


A dog-eared corner. A deep fold from travelling in an envelope. Images blurring and buckling under new digital pressures. The grain of a photocopy reproduced and reproduced again and again. These papers are copies of copies scattered across archives I might never visit, stored in my uncle's garage or in institutions out of my reach.


The archive is not fixed. It holds the marks of every hand that has carried and cared for it.


Each of my prints carry some degree of loss and alteration. My plates will wear down. Burrs soften. Just like memory, no image can be retrieved unchanged. Through marks, scratches and decisions, I cannot reproduce these images perfectly. With every impression, I carry something forward and I’ll leave something behind.


My hand will slip, weary. My hand will slip, thoughtless. My hand will slip, misguided.


This loss is not a failure of process but a reflection of memory itself. My work does not seek faithful reproduction. Instead, reproduction is transformation. Reproduction is reclamation.


My prints extend the life of my family archive, creating new versions of stories and images that continue to circulate and return to the tin. Print making allows these stories to remain active, moving between Xerox machines, administrative systems and family hands.


I will hold this tin for many more decades, keeping it stashed beneath my bed, where sleepless fingertips reach for it in search of comfort and direction and purpose. And I hope that, one day, my own family will find my story folded carefully inside. Where I’ll be alongside my old people, with some of me carried forward and some of me left behind in the papers, copies and stories that brought me here.








ARTIST BIO
Emma-Lee Maher is a Kongabula artist and writer, born on Ballardong Country and raised between the Wheatbelt and the Southwest. Her work digs into memory, family and place across visual and written forms. Emma has exhibited at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, and her writing has been published in Portside Review and Splinter Journal