The cut and the stitch: wounds in two-dimensional practice

Alexandra Mawimbi's two-dimensional works sit in a peculiar tension. They are flat, bounded by the rectangle of paper or canvas, yet they behave as if something has happened to them. A line scores the surface like a blade. A thread loops back through a tear. Pigment pools where a stain ought to have been allowed to dry. The vocabulary is unmistakable: incision, suturing, repair. What looks at first like drawing or painting reveals itself, on longer looking, as a kind of first aid performed on the picture plane itself.

For audiences walking through the back rooms of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney's Circular Quay, or pausing between canvases at the National Gallery of Victoria's Australian galleries, this kind of work asks a particular kind of patience. Australian viewers, used to the bush landscape tradition of dry heat and wide horizons, sometimes approach flat work expecting resolution. Mawimbi's practice refuses that. The picture is not a window. It is a body that has been opened and is now, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes tenderly, being closed again.

The metaphor of the wound is not decorative. It comes from a long art-historical conversation about what it means to represent injury without aestheticising it. In Mawimbi's hands, the wound becomes a site of production. Cutting generates the line; mending gives the work its second life. The flat surface, so often coded as passive or contemplative, becomes an arena of action. Even when the marks are small, even when the canvas is barely larger than a tea towel drying on a Hills hoist in a suburban backyard, the gesture registers.

This essay moves across that territory. It looks at the physical gestures of cutting and mending, the materials that carry them, the way mourning and living presence enter the work, and how the practice sits inside the wider Australian art conversation. Along the way it asks what it means to treat a picture as something that can be hurt, and what it means to insist on repair.

The gesture of the cut

Cutting, in two-dimensional work, is rarely literal. Few artists actually take a scalpel to the paper, though some do. The gesture operates as a metaphor that allows the artist to talk about incision, decision, and rupture without leaving the discipline of drawing. A line that begins like a description of something in the world can pivot into a mark of damage. Mawimbi's practice understands this slippage. Her drawn lines often carry a slight tremor, a hesitation that makes them feel like they were made by someone working close to the edge of their own attention.

When she does cut the support, the result is closer to confession than composition. A slit in a sheet of paper is not a compositional device in the usual sense. It cannot be balanced, ruled, or adjusted with a fresh sheet. It commits the work to a future that includes that slit. The viewer, encountering it later, reads the gesture as evidence of a moment. Something was felt. Something was acted upon.

In the Australian context, where the dominant traditions of flat art have often favoured either the slow observational patience of the Heidelberg School or the bold political graphics of the printmaking collectives, this kind of bodily mark-making reads as quietly radical. It refuses the panoramic and refuses the slogan. It stays, instead, with the small and the somatic. A Brisbane collector visiting a Sydney studio might describe the works as having a kind of "honest" quality, though the word does not quite catch it. The honesty is not confessional. It is structural. The cut is there because the cut happened.

Mending as method

If cutting generates the wound, mending is what gives it a future. Mawimbi's approach to repair draws on a wide field of reference: from Japanese kintsugi, where broken ceramics are rejoined with lacquer mixed with gold, to the domestic craft of visible mending practiced in kitchens and shearing sheds across rural Australia. The mended object is not pretending to be whole. It carries its history on its surface, the way a fence rail patched with wire still shows the spot where the break occurred.

In the flat works, mending appears as stitching, taping, overlaying, and re-drawing. A line that was cut across may be brought back with a thread. A stain may be framed by a careful contour that acknowledges the spill without concealing it. These interventions refuse the modernist fantasy of the untouched surface. They insist that the picture has been through something, and that the act of looking at it is, in part, an act of witnessing that passage.

This matters in a country where repair is a daily reality rather than a metaphor. Drive past any fibro cottage in Marrickville or Brunswick and you will see patched roofs, replaced weatherboards, improvised gutterwork. The Australian suburb is a landscape of ongoing mending. Mawimbi's pictures speak fluently to that condition, even when the imagery is nowhere near suburban. The logic of repair, of staying with a damaged thing and making it serviceable without pretending it was never broken, is a logic many viewers already inhabit.

Material, surface, and the weight of paper

Paper, in particular, behaves as a co-author in this practice. It receives a cut the way skin receives a scratch: with a small flinch, a parting, a memory of the gesture stored in the fibre. Mawimbi uses this. Her chosen papers, often heavy enough to carry weight without buckling, are treated not as grounds to be covered but as bodies to be worked upon. The way a sheet yellows, cockles, or holds a fold becomes part of the work's vocabulary.

Pigment is applied sparingly. There is a discipline in the flat works that prevents the colour from overwhelming the physical history of the support. A wash may sit beside a stitch. A graphite line may run into a strip of tape. The eye is forced to read across different kinds of mark, different temporalities. Some marks were made yesterday. Others feel as though they have been there for years, waiting for the stitching to arrive.

Australian light, that famously unforgiving southern light, treats these surfaces with a particular harshness. A work that looks subdued in a Melbourne warehouse opening can look stark under the late afternoon sun falling through a north-facing window in a Newtown terrace. Mawimbi, who has shown widely in this country, seems to understand this. Her palettes tend to absorb rather than reflect, holding the viewer's gaze without bouncing it back. In a market where collectors increasingly ask how a work will sit in a domestic interior, this is a quiet but useful quality.

Mourning, presence, and the living mark

The wound in these pictures is not abstract. It carries grief. Mawimbi's work has long been concerned with mourning: who is mourned, how, and by whom. The two-dimensional pieces are among the most direct expressions of this concern. They function as small monuments to loss, without the architectural ambition of the larger installations. A torn and stitched sheet can hold a name the way a headstone holds one, but at a different scale, in a different key.

What distinguishes her mourning from the sentimental is its insistence on living presence. The work does not seek to fix the dead in a posture of eternal stillness. Instead, the stitching, the re-drawing, the overlay, all suggest a continuing relationship. The dead are not finished. They are still being worked on. The wound is not healed; it is tended. This distinction matters because it refuses the closure that grief is so often pressured to perform. Australian audiences, shaped by cultures that sometimes valorise stoic silence around loss, recognise this refusal. It feels true.

The physical presence of the work supports this. Because the marks are handmade, because the stitching is visible, because the paper bears the evidence of handling, the viewer is never allowed to forget that another human being made this. That fact, simple as it sounds, is the ethical core of the practice. The picture is not a representation of presence. It is a record of it.

Where the flat meets the room

Mawimbi's two-dimensional pieces rarely exist in isolation for long. They migrate into installations, lean against walls at angles, sit on low plinths next to sculptural objects. The flat work, in these contexts, behaves differently than it does on a gallery wall. It becomes a kind of evidence, a document, an artefact within a larger field. The wound reads differently when there is a three-dimensional body in the room.

This shuttling between registers is characteristic of contemporary Australian practice, where the move from the studio wall to the project space has become almost routine. A drawing made in Collingwood may end up propped against a concrete column in an ACCA show, picking up shadows from the works around it. Mawimbi's pictures seem to relish this mobility. They do not insist on the white cube. They are willing to sit on the floor, to be pinned, to be carried.

For collectors and curators, this raises practical questions. How do you frame a work that does not always want a frame? How do you light a piece that absorbs rather than reflects? How do you insure something whose value lies partly in its fragility? The Australian market, more cautious than its American or Asian counterparts, has learned to take these questions seriously. It is part of why Mawimbi's work has found a steady audience here rather than a spectacular one.

A note on spectacle and the wound

It is worth pausing on the relationship between the small wound and the large spectacle. Australian visual culture is saturated with spectacle: from the bright signage of Crown Melbourne to the relentless churn of the Sydney tabloids. Mawimbi's quiet, hand-made marks sit in deliberate opposition to this. They refuse scale, brightness, seduction. They make their claim with a stitch and a stain.

Yet the wound and the spectacle are not unrelated. Both involve a kind of opening. The spectacle opens the viewer to overwhelm; the wound opens the viewer to attention. One anaesthetises; the other sensitises. In her more extended projects, Mawimbi has explored this kinship directly, examining how mass entertainments and collective grief share a certain grammar of excess. A piece such as the casino mania project sits inside that inquiry, asking what kinds of openness contemporary life rewards, and which it punishes.

The flat works, in this light, function as a kind of counter-practice. They train the eye to read small differences. They teach the hand, by proxy, to slow down. In a market that often mistakes volume for value, this is a quiet political act.

Reading and looking at these works

For visitors approaching Mawimbi's two-dimensional practice for the first time, a few approaches can help.

The archive on this site gathers the two-dimensional work alongside the broader practice, allowing readers to trace how a single gesture, a cut, a stitch, a re-drawn line, moves between disciplines. For those who want to spend time with the quieter end of Mawimbi's output, the drawings and works on paper repay attention out of proportion to their size. They ask for little and they return a great deal.

Visit the archive, follow the links through to individual works, and let the small gestures accumulate. The wound in two-dimensional work is not a spectacle. It is an invitation to slow looking, and the site is built to make that kind of attention possible.