Amelia Skelton
A thousand attics
14 – 29 June 2025

Works
Exhibitions
Installation views
Press release 

‘. . .all those excluded, marginalised voices, unheard testimonies and objects imbued with specific historically located and narrated significance crowded into art’s buildings and spilled out into hitherto non-art sites and streets, like so many tokens of reminiscence brought down from a thousand attics after decades of being stowed away.’



It is clear that Amelia Skelton has a sentimental streak. Not in a saccharine way. In a way that she cares deeply for people and their stories. This interest in human beings is at the core of her art making. She is attracted to materials and objects that are infused with a history, that carry memories of a person or a time.


Not long after I first met Amelia, she was selling handmade keyrings, and I bought one: a simple flower form with smiley face in the centre, made of resin. It made me happy seeing that little smiley faced flower attached to my keys, and it stayed there until it broke beyond repair. Amelia understands the power of objects.


When we met on zoom to talk about this exhibition, her second solo with Nasha Gallery, Amelia told me that she had been contemplating why we hold onto certain objects, and how these things can hold such meaning to a person. Growing up in a Catholic family, Amelia remembers her grandma giving her small figurines of saints – her grandma’s favourite was St Jude, the patron saint of desperate cases and lost causes. Icons and symbolic objects of worship are deeply embedded in Catholicism; not that Amelia is religious. But what do the trinkets, mementos, souvenirs, keepsakes, knickknacks, tchotchkes, trinkets (we have so many names for these ‘things’…) that we hold onto say about us? What can they reveal about the way we live, our experiences and stories, the things we hold dear?


For this exhibition, Amelia has embarked on her first foray into aluminium casting, immortalising in precious metal a selection of found and collected everyday objects – a small religious figure, a dolphin key ring, a needle and thread. Pressed onto wax or clay discs before being cast, these objects are reminiscent of ancient coins or lucky charms. Hung from ropes of fabric, suspended between floor and ceiling of the gallery, they really do resemble a giant’s charm bracelets. Amelia’s partner said they look like umbilical cords – and that makes sense too, because we find connection to each other and the world through things.


One person’s trash is another’s treasure. So the saying goes…  Amelia has long collected fabrics and textiles, attracted to the countless untold histories held in their fibres – of the people who bought or wore or made or used them. That is the beautiful thing about textiles: they are made by and for humans. The textiles in Amelia’s collection have been accumulated over years, purchased from second-hand stores, found, or gifted by family and friends. Rescuing textiles from the inevitable trash heap, Amelia reworks them into something new and beautiful, imbuing them with a value beyond their primary function. The reverence with which Amelia treats her materials is evident, not only in the finished works, but in the way her collection of fabrics is lovingly folded and organised in her studio.


Amelia’s works hold traces of people. Often these are people close to her, like in the series of works made for her exhibition This one goes out to the one(s) I love at Firstdraft in 2022: quilted and hand-embroidered textile ‘masks’, each acting as a memento or ode to a loved one. But sometimes the traces are of strangers or unknown subjects, and I think this type of connection to other humans appeals to Amelia too.


The patchwork quilts in this exhibition hold glimpses into multiple universes. For this new body of work, Amelia has used collected and archived digital images, rather than fabrics. Well, some of the images are of fabrics in her collection, following on from her recent exhibition Everything is Sacred, for which she inventoried her fabric collection. Also thrown into the mix are digitised scans – of historic family photographs gifted by Amelia’s grandma, and of archeological sites, found and purchased from Reverse Garbage near her studio in Marrickville (this discovery felt serendipitous: Amelia had been exploring the notion of excavation as a metaphor for memory) – as well as photos Amelia took of collections, her own and those of her partner and mum. Using this database of categorised images, Amelia has created digital patchworks that explore the notion of memory and connection. Printed onto sheer fabric and sewn into quilts, the images held within these pieces have been transported from the real to the digital to the real again. Cropped and removed from context, the many stories these quilts hold are only hinted at, allowing the viewer to fill in the gaps, to discover the threads and create their own narratives.


Amelia told me that the title of the exhibition is A Thousand Attics, a line she was sure she had read somewhere and scribbled down in a notebook. But she couldn’t find the source. We pondered whether it was something that came to her in a dream. Perhaps it isn’t so important where it’s from, seeing as we are constantly picking up and collecting things from the mess of life that surrounds us – words and phrases, images, snatches of music, photographs snapped on smart phones – all combining to create some form of meaning. But a few days later, Amelia emailed me: she had found the source of the quote. It was in the introduction of a publication on memory. How apt. Another phrase from the quote stood out to me: ‘like so many tokens of reminiscence…’. When I think about Amelia’s practice, and the works in this exhibition, this phrase seems to sum it up perfectly.



Laura Couttie



Ian Farr, ‘Introduction: Not Quite How I Remember It’, in Ian Farr (ed.), Memory, London: co-published by Whitechapel Gallery and the MIT Press, 2012, pp. 12–27.