Exhibitions

Sleeping, Dreaming, Waking is a series of textile collages by Susan Wirth, developed through periods of research in and around Ararat and the Wimmera Mallee. The project examines how visitor status, site specificity, and settler heritage intersect in a contemporary textile practice. Using found textiles and second‑hand woollen blankets – materials tied to industrial manufacturing and histories of colonisation – Wirth constructs geometric, rhythmical compositions that operate as scaffolds for formal and conceptual exploration.

Susan Wirth is a Naarm (Melbourne) based artist whose practice works across sculpture, collage and video. Working with second-hand and found materials, she produces low-relief textile works and site-responsive installations that foreground materiality, process and the transformative potential of everyday experience. Through layering, accumulation and acts of reconfiguration, Wirth engages abstraction to examine perception, consciousness and the entangled histories of settler identity in relation to place.

Born on Gadigal Country, Wirth now lives and works on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country on the northern fringe of Naarm. She began her formal art training in Garramilla/Darwin completing an Associate Diploma in Fine Art at Northern Territory University, before relocating to Naarm to undertake a Bachelor of Fine Art (Sculpture) at the Victorian College of the Arts. She later completed a Graduate Diploma in Art Therapy at La Trobe University.

Wirth has exhibited widely throughout Naarm and interstate. Recent exhibitions include Mejia Gallery, Brunswick, alongside Melinda Harper (2024), and Women of the Badlands at Montsalvat (2026). Commissions and collaborative projects include Nillumbik Nocturne, a site-specific projection installation for the Digital Agora Festival, Nillumbik (2018); tread lightly, produced with Paradoxa Collective at Bunjil Reserve, Panton Hill (2021); and hanging Earth, grounded stars at RACV Goldfields Artshouse (2025).

Image: Susan Wirth, 'Untitled' (detail), 41cm x 43 cm- wool, cotton and polyester. Photo: Matthew Stanton.