Tia Ansell | Intimate Geography: {Suite}

Intimate Geography is a new body of work exploring the layering of sublimated images within Tia Ansell’s gridded weavings. Bringing together landscape, architecture and textiles, the works consider experiences of immanence and reverence - moments in which something greater than ourselves seems to emerge within the ordinary world.

Through the application of heat, dye is permanently fused into the fibres of the woven surface, embedding photographic images directly into the weaving. The resulting surfaces resist fixed readings, occupying a shifting space between image and material, representation and abstraction.

Drawing from an archive of photographs taken across Australia, Kenya, Japan and Ecuador, Ansell returns to moments in which the familiar world seems to open onto something less tangible. These are not necessarily religious experiences, but encounters with a heightened sense of presence - moments of awe, stillness or connection in which the boundary between the self and the surrounding world feels momentarily diminished.

In the grasslands of Kenya’s Maasai Mara, a lone tree stands within a landscape burnt to encourage new growth and facilitate migration. Elsewhere, the setting sun follows the first rain in two months, while an aerial view reveals the intricate patterns of the grassland below. In Ecuador, patterned tiles within Quito’s Basilica del Voto Nacional evoke the architectural language of religious devotion, where geometry, repetition and ornament organise the experience of the sacred.

In Tokyo, the delicate week-old blossoms of the ume plum tree and the quiet interiors of a tea house offer different expressions of attentiveness where seasonal change, ritual and material detail invite a slower form of looking. In Melbourne, the religious site of various religious churches provides another point of encounter between architecture, belief and transcendental spaces.

The grid offers a structure through which the world can be observed and organised, while the photographic image introduces fragments of lived experience that exceed its boundaries. As image and textile merge, the works hold open a space between the visible and the intangible, inviting a form of looking grounded in curiosity, humility and wonder. Here, geography is not simply the mapping of physical environments, but an intimate record of the relationships, memories and moments of presence through which we come to feel connected to the world.