Upwey textile artist Natasja van Wyk has spent the last year stitching red thread through fabric – not just as a form of art, but as a way of coping with grief. Now, her work has found a powerful public voice in ‘Threads of Violence’, a raw and deeply moving exhibition on display at The Memo in Healesville from Thursday, 17 April to Sunday, 6 July, 2025.
Using torn red cloth, delicate stitching, and unspoken memory, Ms Van Wyk’s work invites viewers into a space of vulnerability and reflection. But behind the striking visuals, lies something much more intimate – the lived experience of trauma, grief, and the slow, quiet process of healing.
On 9 July 2024, Ms van Wyk received the call no one should ever get: her brother, Johannes, had been murdered in South Africa.
Immediately, she retreated to her studio at Burrinja and started sewing.
Not to make art. Not for anyone else to see. Just to keep breathing.
“I didn’t know how to talk about it,” she said.
“So I started stitching. I used what I had — my tablecloth, curtains from my old home in South Africa, the clothes I was wearing when I was mugged. The red fabric just kept growing.”
Those early stitches — raw, uneven, necessary — became the foundation of Threads of Violence, now on display at The Memo in Healesville. It is a textile exhibition unlike any other: intimate, haunting, and achingly honest.
At first glance, the panels appear beautiful. But beauty isn’t the point.
Visitors are invited to examine the work with UV flashlights, revealing hidden messages stitched into the cloth — stories Ms van Wyk never meant to tell, the conversations she wished she never had to have.
What lies beneath the surface is what truly matters.
“With this exhibition, I’m telling the stories I never told before — the ones that shape us, that change us, but that we’re not always brave enough to say out loud,” she said.
Every thread in the exhibition carries weight: memory, loss, resilience.
In South Africa, violence — including hijackings like the one that took Johannes’ life — has become frighteningly normalised. This exhibition holds space for what is too often silenced or accepted as “just how things are.”
Here, those stories are honoured instead. Slowly. Quietly. Stitch by stitch.
Alongside her solo work, the exhibition features Threads of Connection — a growing community quilt stitched from the words of strangers.
Visitors are invited to write down a conversation they wish they never had. Their words are anonymous, private — and yet profoundly shared.
“There’s no pressure to write anything,” Ms van Wyk said.
“But people do. Something about the space lets them.”
She is turning those words into a large floral quilt — a work of collective remembrance, soft and bold all at once.
Threads of Violence is not a cry of pain, but a testimony of survival.
It does not ask for pity. It offers permission.
To feel. To speak. To rest. To begin again.
“There’s hope here too,” Ms van Wyk said.
“Not the loud kind. But the kind that stays.”
Threads of Violence is showing at The Memo in Healesville until Sunday, 6 July.
