Harriet Goodall
b. 1975, Yass, NSW, Australia
Lives and works in Dharawal-Gundungarra country, Robertson, NSW

Harriet Goodall was raised on a large grazing and cropping property in rural Australia and has spent her career exploring belonging and her passion for the land. She creates recognisable fibre sculptures utilising a combination of found materials expressing an environmental awareness. The similitude of micro and macro patterns in the landscape and mark-making is expressed in gestural, hand-bent line, which demarcates space like lines of fences, boulders or pieces of bark. Meditative, tactile practices of weaving, stitching and painting are central, and she melds them with metalwork techniques which she saw her father use in the farm workshop. In process, basketry and weaving act as metaphors for gentle ‘women’s work’ inverted with the louder ‘masculine’ pursuits of welding and angle grinding. Harvesting plant materials and earth pigments, salvaging agricultural off-casts give Goodall opportunities to survey the bush, and she creates elegant reflections with a focus on form and shadow.  

Goodall has practiced full-time for twenty years, weaving and creating commissioned works in many private and public collections. Studying under well-respected international basketmakers and subsequently teaching thousands of weavers, in person and online, she has a devoted following. In recent years, Goodall has led creative retreats in Italy, Laos, the USA, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia, and Portugal. Her love for woven cloth and textiles was forged on early travels through the Himalaya and the Andes, birthing a fair-trade exchange with indigenous weavers across South America for fifteen years and igniting a passion for advocacy and collaborations with weaving communities. She has created a kinetic installation from grasses, which was activated by a dancer for arts festivals, and is well regarded as an innovator in the world of sculptural fibre. 

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