Edwina McLennan (°1990) is a visual artist based in Brisbane. After studying fashion at the Royal Academy of Antwerp, she returned to Australia to complete her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Griffith University. 

Edwina's material-based practice shows a special love for textiles. Having long been considered and undervalued as domestic art and women's work, textiles, have also been part of the expression of our identity forever and have become a contemporary sign of capitalism. With consumption as a means of creating our identity, we manifest ourselves with what we have instead of who we are and base the construction of our personality on products and advertisement. These images of mass consumption, mainly from fashion magazines, are the raw material she uses to compose her compositions. 

She combines handmade, mechanical, and digital processes to pull these commodified images apart and paste them back together again into Surrealist abstract apocalyptic landscapes in which mystical creatures roam. Just as the fantasy of the Apocalypse confronts mankind with itself, her works are an invitation to rethink and reframe. 

Our digital life can be seen as a second skin, just like the textiles we wear. 

With digital images showing mostly flatness, there is a revival of the importance of texture, which the artist explores through manual processes such as painting, sewing, and collage. Mass production has detached mankind from the creative processes of labor. A return to manual processes might provide the opportunity to bring people together to create a more ethical world by making individual-considered choices.