Hills Hoist will be presented at City Library Gallery, 253 Flinders Lane, 12 November – 7 December 2025.

Official opening 13 November, 5.30-7.30 pm.

Between the lines of laundry: Aldona Kmieć on memory, migration and the Australian backyard

In a quiet backyard in regional East Gippsland, the wind turns a Hills Hoist. Sunlight flashes through cotton sheets, and the sound of the line creaking becomes almost musical. It’s here that I began Hills Hoist, a series that transforms one of Australia’s most ordinary suburban icons into a meditation on love, memory, and belonging.

The Hoist was always there. It appears in so many photographs, always in the background—rarely the subject. When I arrived in Australia, it struck me as both strange and deeply familiar. It’s a machine of repetition: clothes go up, come down, and life goes on. In my lens, the Hills Hoist becomes more than a relic of mid-century suburbia. It’s a silent witness to domestic histories—both private and collective. The Hoist might be invisible to those who grew up with it, but for me it became a kind of cultural anchor—a structure that represents both familiarity and strangeness.

Through a combination of digital and medium-format analogue photography, my images document my family’s daily life on their farm in Poland, under increasing economic and existential pressures. I didn’t want to romanticise what a working farm looks like. There’s melancholy bin their stillness, but also endurance. Photographing it became a way to witness the persistence of ordinary life, in a place where life can have an overwhelming intensity.

Two years in the making, the project also includes cyanotypes made on found textiles, created in collaboration with my sister during my recent visit to Poland. These fabric works using family archives extend the photographic image into touch and material memory—European sunlight imprinted directly onto the cloths that once hung on our family line.

While the Hoist might look quintessentially Australian, I’m looking at it as an outsider observing a national symbol. My broader body of work has often engaged with displacement and cultural adaptation; here, that inquiry takes a domestic turn. For someone who’s migrated, even the smallest objects become loaded with memories. 

Although the Hoist has long been celebrated as an emblem of Australian ingenuity and postwar optimism, my work subtly reframes it. It was part of the dream of progress—the suburban block, the nuclear family, the white picket fence. But that dream didn’t include everyone. Photographing the Hoist in multicultural and rural contexts makes that history visible again. The politics are in the landscape itself. There’s poetry in persistence.

More information about the Artist and her projects https://aldonakmiec.com/