An exhibition at the National Crafts Museum & Hastkala Academy in New Delhi brought together Indigenous Australian fibre traditions and Indian mountain craft practices, highlighting how communities across continents preserve cultural memory through weaving and ritual objects.
Titled ‘The Guardians Across Mountains and Sea’, the exhibition is curated by Divjyot Singh of the Australian High Commission and features hand-woven sculptural works by Australian First Nations artist Grace Lillian Lee alongside Indian craft traditions such as siki grass weaving and hand-carved wooden masks from tribal communities in Nagaland and Himachal Pradesh.
The Indian artefacts are drawn from the collection of the National Crafts Museum, creating a dialogue between Indigenous Australian and Indian mountain traditions.
Craft as a living archive
The exhibition explores how craft functions as a living archive through which communities transmit knowledge, identity and spiritual beliefs across generations.
Through woven forms, masks and ceremonial objects, the works reflect the ways oral traditions survive by evolving over time. Ballads, ritual enactments, artisanal weaving and carving practices continue to carry the cultural identity of communities even as modernisation and globalisation reshape traditional societies.
Australian High Commissioner to India Phillip Green said the exhibition highlights how traditional knowledge continues to shape contemporary artistic expression.
“Australian artist Grace Lillian Lee’s presentation foregrounds First Nations knowledge as living practice. Rooted in tradition yet unmistakably present, her work reminds us that ancestral knowledge moves, adapts and continues to shape contemporary art,” Green said.
Dialogue across cultures
Lee’s sculptures investigate materials and forms that evoke both botanical and bodily structures, reflecting how craft traditions link the maker, the natural environment and ancestral knowledge.
Australian First Nations textile heritage, rooted in ancient fibre practices, is presented alongside Indian mountain material culture that similarly embodies ancestral spirits, protective deities and mythological beings.
Together, the works reveal how communities across distant geographies use material practices to sustain cultural memory and maintain connections between people and place.
About the artist – Grace Lillian Lee
Grace Lillian Lee is a Samsep, Indigenous Australian designer, artist, advocate, and the founder of First Nations Fashion + Design (FNFD), a national platform dedicated to empowering Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander creatives through sustainable pathways into the fashion industry. A descendant of the Miriam Mer people of the Eastern Torres Strait, Lee is reshaping the landscape of Australian fashion by centring First Nations culture and talent.
Lee has exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas and her work is represented in major collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; and Cairns Art Gallery, Queensland. In 2025, she was recognised by BOF 500.
