Jemima Wyman transforms protest smoke into an immersive textile, considering camouflage, collective action and the political charge of pattern.
Jemima Wyman’s Haze 18, 2025, is a custom-printed curtain derived from the artist’s hand-cut photographic collages of smoke clouds generated at protests around the world. The expanded title includes details about each piece of smoke pictured: the type (of smoke), protest, place, date and colour, comprising 3949 words. Described by Wyman as an “ideological textile”, Haze considers how fabric can carry political meaning through its associations with propaganda, camouflage, protest attire and conflict. Suspended in space, the curtain becomes both image and atmosphere: seductive, deceptive and tactical. It reflects on collective action, public unrest and the capacity of images to reveal, obscure and mobilise political feeling.
“I think of the Haze works as ideological textiles. They carry images of protest smoke as both warning and possibility: signs of discontent, but also a reminder of collective resilience and the hope for change.”
Jemima Wyman
About the Artist
Jemima Wyman is a Palawa artist based in Los Angeles, working across collage, photography, textiles, video, and installation. Her practice explores pattern, masking, and camouflage as visual strategies of resistance, examining how bodies, images, and political movements negotiate visibility, concealment, and collective identity.
Presented by Sullivan+Strumpf
About Installations
Installations presents ambitious contemporary art throughout Carriageworks, and for the first time, extends into the city. The program of 14 projects features sculpture, textiles, painting, photography, kinetic forms, and public interventions, with works that are generous and immediate but also ask us to look more closely at the social, ecological, and cultural systems shaping our world.
Artists use spectacle, material invention and public address to explore some of the defining questions of contemporary life: how histories inhabit place, how images circulate, how materials carry memory, and how audiences gather, move, participate and reflect. Installations is curated by José Da Silva, Director of UNSW Galleries.
