Thread: Connecting Stories and Community.: National Portrait Gallery

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.

Kyra Mancktelow is a proud Quandamooka artist with strong cultural ties to Eulo and the South Sea Islander community of Vanuatu. Working across printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, and bronze casting, her multidisciplinary practice brings cultural stories to life through distinct material languages.

Grounded in heritage and lived experience, her work shares knowledge, challenges colonial narratives, and explores identity, memory, and resilience with both poetic subtlety and emotional depth.

Currently undertaking a PhD at the Queensland College of Art, Kyra exhibits nationally. She won the 2021 Telstra Emerging Artist Award at the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards and received a Special Commendation at the 2021 Churchie National Emerging Art Prize.

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James Tylor is a multi-disciplinary visual artist whose practice explores Australian environment, culture and social history through photography, video, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, sound, scent and food.

James’ artistic practice specialises in experimental and historical photographic processes. He uses a hybrid of analogue and digital photographic techniques to create contemporary artworks that reference Australian society and history. The processes he employs are the physical manipulation of digital photographic printing, such as the manual hand-colouring of digital prints or the application of physical interventions to the surfaces of digital prints. James also uses the historical 19th century photographic process of the Becquerel daguerreotype with the aid of modern technology to create new and contemporary daguerreotypes. Photography was historically used to document Aboriginal culture and the European colonisation of Australia. James is interested in these unique photographic processes to re-contextualise the representation of Australian society and history.

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