INTERVIEW | Fibre Artist and Weaver, Tammy Kanat

INTERVIEW WITH

Within the soulful landscape of our Armadale store, a new dialogue has begun. For the duration of Melbourne Design Week, we are honored to house the works of Melbourne-based fibre artist and weaver, Tammy Kanat. An artist whose philosophy of slow, intentional making mirrors our own reverence for crafting textiles for the home.

For Tammy, the loom is not merely a tool but a vessel for "deep listening", where wool and warp transform into physical manifestations of feeling. Through her hands, natural fibres become stories of place and memory. This philosophy found a natural home at CULTIVER Armadale, where we forged a creative kinship rooted in a shared language of texture. Her original artworks, Rose Meadow and Olive Field, were composed in response to the store's architecture and the tactility of our linens.

We invite you to experience these works in person, on display from 14-24 May at 1069 High Street, Armadale.

Read on for our interview with Tammy, where she reflects on the profound, emotional nature of her craft and the enduring presence of art in the home.

Left: Photographed by Mark Lobo | Right: Photographed by Caitlin Mills

"In a world of instant gratification, I find the slowness of this practice genuinely nourishing. The hand-worked nature of weaving demands presence and patience, and in return offers a sincerity and depth that cannot be rushed."

- Tammy Kanat

I am a Melbourne-based artist working across handwoven tapestry, sculptural fibre, and bronze. At the heart of my practice is a deep engagement with colour, texture, and the emotional life of materials, how things made by hand carry feeling, and meaning in ways that are difficult to articulate but immediately felt.

I came to this work through a fortuitous path. For many years I worked as a jewellery designer, and the transition into tapestry was both familiar and surprising. There was something I recognised immediately, the intimacy of working by hand, the deep respect for material, the slow and deliberate nature of making. And yet the shift from precious stones and metals to wool, warp and weft was profound. A different kind of richness entirely. One I have never looked back from.

I am also a mother of three, and I think that shapes my practice more than people might expect. The patience, presence, and attentiveness that motherhood asks of you, I carry all of that into the studio.

My work sits within a tradition of Australian fibre art I hold with genuine reverence, driven always by curiosity and a willingness to follow the work wherever it leads.

Creativity, for me, is a form of deep listening, to materials, to emotion, to memory and to the natural world. I find myself constantly observing: the colour of a garden at a particular hour, the way light moves across a landscape, the quiet geometry of nature. Those impressions accumulate slowly and find their way into the work, often in ways I couldn't have predicted.

The Australian landscape lives very close to the surface of everything I make. But I am also someone who has always been deeply moved by the artists who came before me. Barbara Hepworth's feeling for form and material, Rothko's use of colour as pure emotional experience, Magdalena Abakanowicz's fearless expansion of what fibre could be and say, and the Albers, Josef's investigations into colour relationships and Anni's unwavering belief in weaving as a serious art form. These artists shaped how I see the world and continue to inform how I work.

In a world of instant gratification, I find the slowness of this practice genuinely nourishing. The hand-worked nature of weaving demands presence and patience, and in return offers a sincerity and depth that cannot be rushed.

Circle of Her exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Australia | Image courtesy the artist and Jewish Museum of Australia, Melbourne.

Wool holds a particular kind of honesty that I keep coming back to. It carries warmth and vulnerability in equal measure, and it responds to the hand in a way no other material quite does. My relationship with wool is a dialogue, a conversation, almost a dance. The stories that emerge are often unconscious ones, felt rather than planned, but they carry a truth that feels necessary. Like something that needed to be told.

I work with wool the way a painter works with paint, adding and subtracting threads, mixing, and layering colour, building, and pulling back. The palette is never fixed; it shifts and responds as the work grows. Wool is forgiving in the most generous way. It intertwines as it pleases, finds its own relationships, and often surprises me with what it knows.

The medium and the story are inseparable, one and the same. A recent residency at the Australian Tapestry Workshop brought that truth into sharp focus. Gathering eucalyptus, pinecones, and wildflowers from around Lake Eildon, in Victoria, and dyeing my own wool from the land felt like the most natural extension of everything I believe about this practice. When colour comes from the earth itself, the work carries something beyond technique. It carries place, memory and feeling.

These works began with a visit to the Armadale store, touching the fabrics, feeling the textures, moving through the space. I was struck immediately by the quality and intention of everything there. The natural materials and considered palette, the sense that every object had been chosen with real care. I felt a genuine alignment with that, as a textile artist who works with natural fibres and is driven by colour and feeling, it resonated with everything I value in my own practice. From that visit a clear creative direction emerged, and the works followed naturally.

Rose Meadow has a beating heart. A brave orange centre radiates outward through skin-toned pinks that soften and settle into warm, earthy neutrals. She is still and quiet, but deeply alive, a work that asks you to slow down and simply feel.

Olive Field is altogether different. She pulsates with energy, evoking the feeling of moving through groves of trees, the ground beneath your feet, the air around you. There is real vitality here, entirely rooted in nature.

Together they feel like two sides of a living, breathing world. They feel very much at home in the CULTIVER space.

Left: Rose Meadow, 2026 | Right: Olive Field, 2026. Photographed by Caitlin Mills

I always begin with a feeling rather than a formula, an emotional starting point that might be as simple as a memory, a garden or a particular quality of light. Much of the palette is then discovered in the making. Colours behave differently beside one another than they do in isolation, and the loom has a way of revealing combinations I wouldn't have arrived at through planning alone. I've learned to stay open to that, to trust discovery over control. The loom, like wool itself, teaches you to follow rather than force.

Stillness. A quiet invitation to slow down, to be present, to feel something difficult to name but unmistakably felt. I hope the works carry a sense of warmth and emotional ease, that standing before them offers a genuine moment of rest. If someone pauses in front of a piece and feels, even briefly, that the world has gentled a little, that means everything to me.

Photographed by Mark Lobo

Art is the emotional architecture of a space, the thing that determines how a room feels to inhabit, what it asks of the people who move through it. A work placed with intention changes everything around it.

Textile art carries a particular presence in an interior. The warmth, the tactility, the evidence of a human hand in every thread, these qualities speak to something ancient and instinctive in us. We feel them before we understand them.

I have always believed that living with art is one of the most profound things a person can do. It is a daily conversation, between the work, the space and the person inhabiting it. It grounds us, moves us, and reminds us, quietly, of our own humanity. That feels like an extraordinary privilege to be part of as an artist.

It begins with meditation. That stillness carries me into the studio, where the day opens quietly and without agenda.

I make a coffee and enter the space. The first thing I do is acknowledge the work waiting for me, the piece on the loom, exactly as I left it, thread hanging, mid-conversation. There is something deeply satisfying about that continuity. I pick up where I left off.

Once settled, I select something to listen to, usually a documentary or podcast about an artist I have become absorbed by. That is the signal that the day has truly begun. I work on one piece at a time, and once I am in flow I follow it all the way through. The loom, the wool, the colour, everything else falls away.

As the day moves, so does the light. The sun shifts, clouds arrive, and the colours on the loom reveal themselves differently with every passing hour. A combination that felt resolved in the morning might ask a question by afternoon. The work is never static, and it never stops surprising me. That sense of not quite knowing where the work will lead next is what keeps me returning to the studio every morning.

As the sun sets, I leave the studio exactly as it is, books scattered, threads hanging, wool spools mid-thought. A conscious creative mess, waiting patiently for me to return.

@tammykanat

Tammy Kanat is represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney.
For all enquiries, please contact gallery@sallydancuthbert.com.

CULTIVER Armadale photography: Caitlin Mills.

Visit us in stores