Weaving truths and nightmares, entwined with dark humour
Michelle Driver is a South Australian artist working exclusively in handwoven tapestry. Her practice is grounded in a deep respect for the discipline, labour, and time-intensive traditions of the medium. Historically, tapestry was never a domestic craft but a professional trade, exacting and physical. Driver approaches weaving with this same seriousness, positioning tapestry as a site of sustained thinking rather than decoration.
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Her work is shaped by lived experience, including queerness, neurodiversity, and childhood trauma. The loom functions as a slow, obsessive system through which difficult histories can be held, reordered, and examined over time. Repetition and duration are central to her process, allowing psychological intensity to unfold gradually through structure and restraint.
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Driver’s works inhabit a space where gothic aesthetics meet unsettling storytelling. She is drawn to what exists in shadow, to the edges of perception where memory, imagination, and the uncanny blur. Darkness is not used for spectacle, but as a means of revealing beauty within what is discarded, overlooked, or difficult to name. Subtle humour occasionally surfaces, offering moments of tension and release within otherwise charged narratives.
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Through tapestry, Driver weaves truth alongside nightmare, control alongside vulnerability. Her works ask for sustained looking and an encounter that unfolds slowly rather than resolves. They resist speed and immediacy, instead insisting on attention, presence, and material intimacy.
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Her work has been recognised nationally, including winning the 2016 Port Pirie Art Prize and selection as a finalist in numerous art prizes. Most recently, her tapestry 'Warp / Weft' was included in Radical Textiles at the Art Gallery of South Australia, situating her practice within Australia’s contemporary textile discourse.
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Alongside her fine art practice, Driver produces limited design-led works under her label Threefold Designs, including handwoven scarves, genderless soy candles, and resin skulls. These objects extend her ongoing interest in transformation, materiality, and the gothic, allowing ideas from the studio to take alternative forms while remaining grounded in making.