Artist Interview: Conversation with Teelah George

Teelah George is based in Naarm / Melbourne, originally from Boorloo / Perth. George’s practice employs paint, textile, bronze, found objects, and most recently wax. Her work unpacks historical understandings of material relationships and the stories that they tell.

This email exchange between Teelah George and Sophie Holvast, MAMA Education Officer, occurred in April 2026.

The works in Fragile Armour offer an interplay of materials and forms that diverge in meaning, and cultural and social association. Can you tell us about working with material hierarchies and roles, considering labour and art historical contexts?

I have always been interested in how materials change over time. For me the inherent vulnerabilities of material become part of the stories that are expressed through art, and it is the combination of intentional and unintentional elements that drive my practice. 

Imbedded within this is a certain hierarchy of materials and the associations that they hold within a cultural context. Bronze has been used throughout history to memorialise great leaders and it carries these connotations of power and permanence. Textile does not have the same relationship with time and is often associated with female labour and domestic adornment. For Fragile Armour I want to both recognise and collapse these connotations, using both materials in new and challenging ways.

Each component in Fragile Armour exists in the world in a way that is familiar, but in concert with each other begin to subvert original contexts and bring forward questions about value, beauty, labour and time.

Let’s get into the truck tautliners (Perpetual horizon I; Perpetual horizon II), the readymade canvases that in a previous life protected road train cargo on runs across the country. Does this emerge from time spent on the highway between WA and the east coast, having grown up in Boorloo (Perth)? Can you explain where your fascination with these objects began, both as a phenomena and aesthetically, as well as the formal decisions of the bronze rings?

My fascination with the tautliners began with a work that I produced in 2015 called Effect of Dose on Taste. This work was made from a rescued old vinyl banner that had been hanging on a wall in Fremantle. It was completely weathered from many years in the sun and had become thread bare and bleached, with the original graphic having faded away and abstracted completely by exposure. I became obsessed with it and these ideas of time passing and the inherent beauty of the new composition. For me this triggered a relationship with my broader understanding of the inherent vice of materiality and how I wanted to think about it within my practice. 

The tautliners were a similar obsession. I would take images of them as they passed on trucks, fascinated with these travelling ‘drawings’, composed of constant use and exposure over time, creating a surface that reminded me of building a surface with embroidery.

The bronze rings reference the buckle tie down system that makes the tautliners practical. These elements subvert this practicality, using bronze, a material that is associated with monument and permanence as a supportive/ornamental element. This use of bronze as a support and part of a chorus of other more fragile materials is core to how I think about and work with material hierarchies.

There is a common theme of the passage of time that runs through these works – how and by whom time is recorded, made visible, and valued. The weathered, incidental compositions of the tautliners and the ongoing embroidery in Wall piece could be read as records of performance. Can you elaborate on how you work with time as process and concept?

Time is referenced in layered ways with concept and process. Collections form a fundamental part of both my research and my understanding of being an artist. Collections hold time in a very interesting way, the works that are held within them keep time in a linear sense but also completely subvert this. Works can be bought into concert with objects that were made hundreds or thousands of years apart, they allow for the constant reconsideration of ideas and perpetual conversations that are ongoing and forever changing. There is something truly compelling about being part of this ongoing dialogue that has lasted long before I was born and will continue long after I am dead.

Within the confines of my own practice, I like to think about and use time in a similar way. The work is at once a record of labour and the time that takes but expands to contemplate processes out of my control or knowing to include elemental responses to time and weather. I don’t fully understand it and it is this mystery that fascinates me. The process of making is a strange combination of knowing and not knowing of recording but also building, questioning and changing.

The wax rings in the new work Chainmail introduce a material fragility and demonstrate a part of the bronze casting process. You mentioned in a previous interview that the wax rings may end up as a cast bronze chainmail… Can you speak about the transformation of materials from fragile to permanent, and the consideration of future forms in this work?

I have been thinking about a way to incorporate the wax material for some time. It is part of the bronze production process where I will take the malleable casting wax and work it with my hands to produce the rings that will then be turned to bronze using the lost wax casting method. This process takes the fragile wax and turns it into the strong permanence of bronze.

Chainmail is composed of rings, linked together to make a ‘fabric’. The ring has been a repeating motif in my practice, a bronze sculpture that is intentionally marked by my hands and often operates as a support or embellishment. In the wax form the work is very fragile, subverting all notions of practicality.

I have spent many years in museums looking at the ancient fragments of found chainmail, pieced together by curators and anthropologists to give an impression of the process and functionality of the metalwork. The way that they reconfigured into fragments reminiscent of ancient textile fragments, the weathering process of time explicit in both materials.

Over time chainmail will be turned into bronze, transforming the fragility of wax into a strong and permanent sculpture that is a form of ‘cloth’, referencing both the handmade embroidery and the industrial vinyl.

What do you hope or anticipate audiences consider, question and/or feel when encountering the works in Fragile Armour?

Showing this project alongside exquisite new works by Noriko and Kirtika has been a massive privilege and offered ample new insights into their practices and also my own. I think that our approaches to making, time, labour and materiality - although varied - are similarly considered and obsessive. Being able to be in conversation with other artists who are so in tune with their own materiality, processes and histories had enriched the way that I look at my own and hopefully this translates to the experience of the viewer.

On viewing Fragile Armour I want audiences to initially take it in from a distance, seeing the materials working together in a more abstracted way. From this perspective the process and materials are not always immediately clear and are somewhat sublime. The embroidery and the taught liners both seem to shimmer in different ways, punctured by the shine of the bronze. Similarly, the composition of chainmail is distorted. As the viewer moves closer to each work, they are encouraged to consider the familiarity of these materials and contemplate how they exist in the everyday.

It is this tension between the everyday familiarity and the sublime that I want the viewer to take with them, for it to inform how they see and experience these elements in their everyday movements. To recognise that the thread is the same thread used to make our clothes, that the taught liners move through space on the trucks on our roads and ponder the materiality that surrounds us in a more considered way that may initiate curiosity and gratitude.

Fragile Armour is part of nginha - here and now, celebrating the commissioning of new art and ideas as a vital part of the Museum’s activities.

All images by Jeremy Weihrauch