Works woven from
forests, fibres & communities

The beginning of Forest Ambassadors. Through a series of four workshops, creative writing, handmade papermaking, bookmaking and exhibition and in collaboration with 18 children from Cromer Public Primary School, writer Zena Shapter, multimedia artist Alyson Bell and photographer Karen Watson, a poem and a scroll-like work containing their multiple messages were created, marking the birth of the Manual of Kindness. This entire chapter was made possible through the generous support of Bethany Falzon, Arts & Cultural Development Officer at Northern Beaches Council, who opened every door, bringing the team together, facilitating the collaboration and providing the photographic documentation that has given the project such a powerful visual legacy.

The endangered endemic Spotted Gum eucalyptus forest of Pittwater inspired the initiation of the forest-like installation, handmade papers and layered fibres rising into the first of what would become an ever-growing series of tree trunk-like structures.

As winner of the 2020 BigCi Environmental Award, Gloria joined explorer and environmentalist Yuri Bolotin on several bush-walks around the Gardens of Stone and Wollemi National Parks, both part of the eight protected areas forming the UNESCO World Heritage listed Greater Blue Mountains. Unprotected areas within the Gardens of Stone remain at peril due to coal mining and logging. Forest Ambassadors II blossomed here with a clear advocacy goal: that Ben Bullen and Newness Plateau become part of Gardens of Stone National Park.

Due to the Covid pandemic, Gloria was unable to work directly with the children. Instead, fifty children from Bilpin Public Primary School created their scroll with the support of their teachers, transforming local biomaterials into a collage evoking this ancient habitat and contributing their messages to a new chapter of the Manual of Kindness.

Print-media artist Freedom Wilson collaborated on the forest-like installation, adding one of her screenprint drawings capturing the ancient layered Gardens of Stone to two of the veils, deepening the connection between the installation and the landscape it was born from.

A special opening was held for the children and their parents. Gloria took them on a journey through the forest-like installation, weaving together storytelling and the importance of caring for the natural world. After passing through the installation, they arrived at the children's own work, where they were invited to share their experience of the process. The group then moved into a second exhibition space, where Gloria presented the children and teachers with a scroll exchange as a gesture of gratitude for their collaboration.

The following day, the exhibition opened to the general public. Similarly, Gloria led visitors through the forest installation with storytelling, followed by the presentation of the Manual of Kindness scroll created by the Bilpin children, and finally into the second room where the public was invited to write their own messages, adding their voices to the ever-growing archive of the Manual of Kindness.

Incredibly grateful to be one of five artists and five scientists invited to connect, explore and create, together or individually, in the land of Djerassi in the Santa Cruz Mountains. During this five-week residency Gloria explored the remarkable journey of the eucalyptus tree from Australia to California and how its arrival over 150 years ago has shaped culture, landscape and endemic habitat with serious ecological consequences. The resulting exhibition was titled The Tale of the Blue Gum, Eucalyptus Globulus, A Story of Hope and Unforeseen Consequences.

In collaboration with Dr Teresa Marie Connors (multimedia artist, Canada), an audiovisual was created depicting this journey and its consequences, projected through the forest-like installation as the exhibition opened. The residency also included participation in public and academic forums and culminated in published blogs and articles in Leonardo/ISAST's journal, published by MIT Press. The Manual of Kindness continued to grow here, through insightful conversations with a Californian community profoundly divided: those who want to eradicate the eucalyptus and those who want to protect trees that have now been part of their culture and lives for over 150 years.

This chapter of Forest Ambassadors brought together the voices gathered in California and Taiwan, combining their messages into a new scroll-like page of the Manual of Kindness, now written in four languages: English, Spanish, Korean and Chinese.

The residency offered time to explore the land of Bundanon, located on the Shoalhaven River, Illaroo NSW, donated to the Australian people by recognised Australian painter Arthur Boyd and to connect to Country through observation, listening and making. This included the honour of meeting with Elders from the Dharrawal people, the traditional custodians of the land. Bundanon organised a biodiversity conference bringing together First Nations Elders, biologists, botanists and scientists united in the protection of the region, a gathering Gloria was privileged to attend and learn from.

The Manual of Kindness scroll created at Bundanon, uniting messages from Djerassi and Taiwan, was subsequently loaned to the Bob Brown Foundation for use across multiple campaigns for the protection of forests.

The Child Within Us (2016) consists of four double-page structures that open outward like four arms, creating the form that holds the work itself. The base is a mirror and in it, the image of a journey: children walking toward the sky on a clear moonlit night and as they reach the moon they play on swings, walk around it holding hands, the scene repeating into the infinite. Created from Kombucha monoprints on Fabriano paper, the work is both intimate and boundless, a meditation on wonder, play and the inner child that never disappears.

The work was a semifinalist for the Northern Beaches Artist Book Award and exhibited at the Manly Art Gallery and Museum.

An early installation work exploring the material language that would become central to the practice — plaster, burlap, hand-dyed silk, muslin, hand-stitched with silk and cotton threads. The work embodies a deep inquiry into the meeting of organic and constructed materials, of fragility and structure, that continues to resonate in Forest Ambassadors today.

Both a wearable vestment and a suspended textile installation, Indio carries the same devotion to the handmade, the slow and the embodied that defines Gloria's practice across two decades. This same duality continues today in Ghosts of the Gum Trees, currently a work in progress.

A site-specific work created for the entrance bridge of the Coal Loader Centre for Sustainability, Waverton. Living Tapestry consisted of 100 metres of red wool intertwined around the bridge structure like a spider's web, evoking Indra's Net, the ancient Vedic metaphor of infinite interconnectedness, where every jewel reflects every other in an endless cosmic web. A work about the journey through life and the deep connectivity to the universe.

The work was a finalist for the North Sydney Environmental Art Prize, recognised for its poetic engagement with place, material and the natural world.

"The chambers' austere concrete interior and earthen floor provides a raw beauty that invites reflection. This takes me to a biblical verse: all come from dust and to dust all return. For me this passage captures the essences of life, evolution, connectivity and motherhood. To evoke this force, a thick red layer of red dust has been spread on the ground of chamber No. 14. Above this rich carpet of dust, an intricate collection of 578 folded red threads and bones like soldiers-at-arms has been buried forming an intimate forest for the audience to walk through."

The Red Project was an initiative of North Sydney Council celebrating International Women's Day, with more than 70 artists invited to exhibit across six venues. Red was chosen as the symbol of earth, strength and love. Gloria was among the artists selected to create work in the 24 refurbished chambers at the Coal Loader Centre for Sustainability, Waverton. Featured in the Mosman Daily, Thursday 8 March 2018. Photo: Troy Snook.

Specially designed for the Graduate School Gallery at Sydney College of the Arts, Global Veins was a large-scale installation consisting of 780 red wool crocheted threads intertwining feathers, cicada shells, bones, bird nests, dry flowers, leaves, small tree branches, seeds and roots, suspended and installed throughout the open gallery space.

Viewers were invited to walk through this diverse cosmos, to observe in detail the intricate forms of bones, the fragility of feathers and cicada shells and the ever-changing, ephemeral quality of leaf matter. A meditation on nature's interconnected systems, on fragility and permanence, on the beauty held within what is often overlooked. The red thread, vivid, continuous, relentless, bound all things together.

During a creative field study at the Montreal Goldfields as part of the Four Winds Bermagui Project, while walking along the remains of a gold mine from the gold rush period, Gloria looked through metal bars blocking access to one of its dark tunnels. A small and vibrant pink orchid, Dipodium punctatum, caught her attention. As she raised her camera, the person guiding the group shone her torch into the tunnel at precisely the same moment, a pure coincidence that illuminated the orchid in the darkness.

Madre Tierra is a 2-minute looped video that portrays the orchid as a prisoner, held within her cell, her spirit nevertheless alive and radiant. As she slowly rotates through the vast universe, moving through day and night, she journeys toward liberation, until finally, she is free. The video unfolds as a utopian vision: a reality where the natural world is always vibrant, always resilient, no matter what humankind throws at it. It is a meditation on nature's indestructible spirit, its capacity to survive, to flower, to endure.

Part of the Four Winds Fresh Salt Bermagui Project, a collaborative initiative bringing together Yuin people, scientists, historians, authors and artists to celebrate eight estuaries between the sacred mountains of Gulaga and Mumbulla on the NSW south coast. A great honour was to be taken by a Yuin Elder to their sacred place: Mount Gulaga, the place of birth and creation. Faces painted, invited into silence, to open hearts, to listen, to contemplate the grandeur of the ancient geological rocks. As the Elder asked the ancestors for permission to enter the sacred land, Gloria felt profoundly moved and humbled. This encounter resonates through everything that followed in her practice.