Tammy Kanat
History, Jewish lore and feminism are entwined in the ambitious tapestry weavings of Tammy Kanat.
Image credit: Tammy Kanat in her studio in front of Esther, 2025. Photo: Selina Ou. Courtesy of the artist and Jewish Museum of Australia, Naarm/ Melbourne
Culture and religions endure through stories. The longest continuing culture, the First Nations people of Australia, share Dreamtime stories of their ancestor spirits to make sense of who they are and the land on which they live. The Quran holds timeless stories to inspire the heart and nurture the soul. The Torah contains scriptures that guide the beliefs of the Jewish people. Families tell their own stories, like legends, of the grandfather who sacrificed everything or the heroic mother who endured extreme conditions in childbirth. These stories repeat over generations to shape identities and become reinterpreted and reinhabited in ritual, practice and also in art.
Textile weaver Tammy Kanat has embraced the stories of Jewish female archetypes to guide her recent body of work. Without conscious effort, the first archetype manifested through her textile work is Lilith (2024). From Kanat, each additional archetype emerged in an exploration of faith, meditation and feminine strength, as characteristics that endure to shape and guide human behaviour. In Jungian psychology, archetypes are not people but fundamental patterns of experience and emotion, universal across time
and culture.
Kanat works intuitively and discovered her textile weaving practice in the way that so many artists begin. First, from a sense of absence when one discovers that the thing they are looking for does not exist, followed by a drive to create the very thing that they understand to be missing. Kanat wanted a textile weaving for her home. When she couldn’t find what she wanted, she began to experiment. She bought wool, took a short course at the Australian Tapestry Workshop and embarked on a.. Subscribe to read all articles in full
