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Craft for floating Home are a series of rafts that I have recently made whilst in [self-imposed] exile in Townsville away from my ancestral homeland, specifically from the far north east of Tasmania, Tebrikunna. The place in far north eastern Australia that I find myself now living is coastal, perhaps the extent of its familiarity.  Making art is central to my being; as central is the need to carry a physical understanding of an immediate way home from wherever I am in the world. The security of keeping alive the flame of my potential means of return to Tasmania is a meditative preoccupation for me. Making these rafts actual out of the dimension of dream has been a cathartic experience of renewal. These rafts, in the repetitive craft of beach collecting, tying and knotting, take my weight and help me move beyond the everyday. Thinking through why we make things and how they operate in the real and imagined worlds that our origins provide us gives me an elemental pleasure of connectedness. On these rafts I sense movement from where I have been, both in art practice and in a broader cultural sense, toward a quiet space for further formations or  transmissions about culture, place, time to emerge. These rafts are voyageable translations of what absence and isolation are and how they enable the traveller to experience anew.

Julie Gough
June 2005