Kyra Mancktelow and James Tylor are included in Thread: Connecting Stories and Community at the National Portrait Gallery.
At the heart of the exhibition is Kyra’s possum-skin cloak, made over months alongside family, community, and Elders from Logan. Shown here in full for the first time, its ochre and burned marks carry stories shared through workshops and yarning circles. The cloak is the work around which the exhibition was built, and the thread that gives the show its name.James Tylor’s daguerreotype draws on one of photography’s earliest processes, using the medium to examine the complex histories of representation, identity, and colonial Australia. His practice reclaims a process historically used to document First Nations people, turning the camera back towards questions of agency, memory, and cultural identity.Thread: Connecting Stories and Community runs at the National Portrait Gallery until 13 September.
