F. Peitsch. Resolve, 2025, wool, 200mm x 300 mm x 1mm x 12 panels

Flossie Peitsch returns to the factory, whose workers she had previously honoured in paintings, with textile works of her own reflecting a shared humanity.

Everybody is someone

“Mum, what is the country where we are ‘indigenous’?” This might well have been a question posed by any one of my six children during their school days. Occasionally, their class was assigned the task of delving into their personal family history. My answer would have been, “Well, I immigrated to sunny Australia from my frozen birth land, Canada, in the 1970s. My parents were both of Germanic descent and spoke German growing up. Your great, great grandparents bravely journeyed from somewhere within Prussian Germany. Before that, I don’t know, but my sister’s DNA tests show some Irish descent.”

I would have continued, “Your Dad came from the USA. His parents and grandparents were born in America, but because of the attitudes towards migrants, even then, they quickly shed their German / Russian / Polish names, roots and ways. The evidence points to you being a blend of at least nine cultural backgrounds! I guess that makes us not indigenous anywhere.”

Child, “So, does that make us nobody?”

Me, “No, son, this makes us everybody. Everybody is someone from somewhere.”

I know that I am one of many “somebodies”. The desire to belong somewhere after leaving your country of birth is universal. Actually, feeling that you “fit in” to a new country does not occur overnight. But it is gradually and surely happening to me, through my fine art practice. Let me show you how.

Historic paintings of mill workers at their machines

Almost 30 years ago, I was a young mother living in the small town of Lobethal, South Australia. Lobethal’s primary industry, the Onkaparinga Mill established in 1869, had just been bought by an overseas competitor and would shortly be systematically dismantled. For posterity, I took it upon myself to sit on site and paint each employee working at their beloved machines, before being separated forever. What a task! The pen/wash paintings were all completed on-site amongst the noise, heat, humidity, and pungent whiff of wool.

The workers were wholly grateful! The process of portraying the mill workers added historical value, honour, and lent personal respect to their heartfelt tasks, which were so much more than “jobs” Upon completion, the delighted community, of which I was now a part, bought the entire collection of almost thirty watercolours. This was a significant achievement. It remained as a tribute to the soon-to-be-lost generational skills of the Onkaparinga Mill workers.

Then times changed. From 1994, the empty, closed mill was to be found virtually derelict, released from its unsuccessful mixed usages and disgruntled owners. The mill’s dependable noon whistle had ceased to be heard in the valley. A grimness settled over the valley like a fog. My virtuous paintings were forgotten and even vanished altogether. I disappeared, too, having moved interstate. I was now hand-weaving the discarded woollen fibre once used in making the world-famous Onkaparinga blankets, drastically changing artistic mediums.

Then one day late in 2024, a local, who still knew their worth and significance, uncovered the lonely, forgotten, framed paintings in a dusty storeroom. Like the lost paintings, me and my subsequent weavings, were sought out and found too, happily rediscovered via the internet by the current artistic facilitating team at Fabrik Arts & Heritage.

The South Australia Heritage Festival (2025) successfully brought together history and heritage with VERWEBAN (fur- vee- ban): Germanic Interweaving, my solo exhibition at Fabrik. It includes “FEARLESS”, “RUMPLEDQUILTSKINS” and “KITHandKIN”. Approved for a grant, VERWEBAN gained support from the Australian Government’s Arts and Cultural Development Program, Regional Arts Australia and Regional Arts Victoria.

F. Peitsch. Babysteps, 2017, tapestry weaving, 200cm 300cm x 6 panels

“FEARLESS” and being remote

While I was part of very remote outback Australia in indigenous communities, I taught weaving to the school children. In my time off, I also created a set of fifty (50+) new small tapestry weavings for my own art practice. These offer expansive, tactile reflections on the changing world in which I was temporarily immersed. All the outcomes were created over four years on site in isolation from my own family and culture, or reflect this experience. An ancient, changeless, vast landscape and a travelling suitcase of limited fibre resources facilitated both the unity and diversity of design/colour demonstrated.

“RUMPLEDQUILTSKINS”, a deconstructed bed covering

Flossie Peitsch, RUMPLEQUILTSKINS, 2024, cotton, variable dimensions

While living in Lobethal, when I painted the mill watercolours, my husband and I slept under a patchwork quilt made by my mother for our wedding. We slept under our quilt every night for over thirty years. We used it until its log-cabin pattern was in tatters. I tenderly unpicked the frayed squares with the idea of repurposing them somehow. There was little left to save of the tired patches. Sadly, I packed the squares away: unable to reuse them, yet unable to throw them out.

Eventually, an idea came to me! I would make my deconstructed quilt into fine art! I would shape the worn-out squares into animal-shaped “skins”. They would be blocked out in a way reflective of how women dried animal skins for the warmth and covering of their families, since time immemorial. Even today, women go to great trouble and expense to provide warmth and safety for those they love. I followed my own heart and instinct to make peculiar art installations, “RUMPLEDQUILTSKINS”, which are deeply invested in a lived history.

“KITHandKIN”, repurposed and reclaimed materials

F. Peitsch. KITHANDkin (detail), 2025, wooden cot, woollen weaving

A bulging plastic bag of woollen strands lay with my art supplies since 1992. I had hastily bagged up these offcuts during the last days of the Mill after I had drawn and painted the operator at the ‘twisting’ machine. The bag sat heavily on the bottom shelf of my metal cabinet, patiently hibernating for over twenty years.

The wooden structure on which to weave was also from my stockroom. It is the very same cot, now recycled and rotated, that we had used for our six babies more than 30 years ago. In this altered state, I suggest that a cot acts as both a fence for safety and a ladder for advancing through life. If the wooden frame is a skeleton, then the wool fleshes out action and ideas, linking culture and community and shaping beliefs and values.

Two disparate raw materials waited several decades for their artist to discover how to use them. She had to gain the mechanical skills, artistic confidence and the intellectual insight for “KITHandKIN” to arrive at this time. It is akin to being born for both creator and creation.

“Somebodies” doing something for everyone

Many of us “somebodies” survive the stresses of life and massage a need to belong by making craft or art without any external encouragement. We leave a legacy of meaning and sentiment. I say, notice and encourage artists daily. It costs you nothing, but it may mean everything! Your kindness may be all the payment needed to continue the enrichment of the world by those who visually reflect and recount.

Further reading

VERWEBAN catalogue

F Peitsch, SPLACE in THE IMMORTAL NOW, 2006, PhD

About Flossie Peitsch

Dr. Flossie Peitsch, a Creative PhD candidate, Federation University and a PhD from Victoria University and MFA, BFA(HONS) from Monash University, Melbourne, is an internationally exhibiting multimedia, performance art, and installation artist residing near Melbourne. A cross-disciplinary artist, community liaison, academic and art educator, Peitsch is a ‘visual art’ theologian with interests in social sculpture, generating creative communities through the arts and contemporary spirituality, facilitating the self-realisation of being, termed one’s SPLACE.

Tags

G39 | painting | South Australia | textiles | weaving