There’s a new directness to the work of Wadawurrung artist Kait James. She still loves double entendres and her work remains layered with meanings, but the gloves are off. “After the [2023 Voice] referendum, I wanted to go larger and bolder and clearer. I just wanted to say what I wanted to say, and quickly.”

Her most ambitious solo exhibition to date, Red Flags, is currently on a two-year national tour, and is now at Ararat Gallery TAMA in regional Victoria. Mostly new work, James says it emerged out of the need to “continue that ongoing conversation about truth telling and how we look at ourselves as Australians.” She adds, “That’s where my fascination with souvenirs comes from, the representation of us and the commodification of culture.”

James is best known for her brightly embellished tea towels. “The calendar ones that I mainly use, they range from 1968 to 1984,” she says. “You can tell where the imagery has been stolen from. You have Tiwi Island burial poles with Warlpiri shields but they don’t actually acknowledge where they’re from. And then you’ve got the people that are very stereotypical—I see them as people now, even though they’re just imagery. I want to give them a voice as well.”

The tea towels were part of her first solo exhibition in 2019 called Dry Your Dishes on my Culture. Right from the start of her career, she has been taking the absurdity of kitsch Aboriginalia—because tea towels, really?—and layering over them contemporary cultural references that drive home how the racism and commodification are ongoing.

The bright colours and bold text often suggest screen-printed protest posters, though James usually prefers textile crafts. Punch needling is a favourite technique, creating raised sections like cloth patches. In Dot Dot Dot (Sequin) (2024) the text has been placed sequin by sequin, forming a glittering non sequitur about limited definitions of Aboriginal art. James, who has also been curated into Radical Textiles at the Art Gallery of South Australia (2024) and the Tamworth Textile Triennial exhibition (2023), expands her approach in Red Flags. The exhibition spans a variety of mediums, including pennants, ceramics and a series of large tufted hanging rugs.

One of these rugs, I should be so lucky (2024), borrows the same stereotypical imagery that might be seen on a calendar tea towel, but here the men wear traffic cone witches hats and sing lyrics from Kylie Minogue’s 1987 hit song. Above them, James has picked out the word ‘lucky’ in the blue-and-white check of police tape.

James often brings in references from her in youth the 1980s and 1990s. It was a time when a very specific national identity was being manufactured. Advance Australia Fair had just been made the national anthem, and the myth-making went into overdrive with the 1988 bicentenary of the landing of the First Fleet. It produced a truly remarkable amount of souvenir tat, from plastic flags to collectable coins. Maybe it’s no great surprise that James ended up so fascinated by cultural ephemera and what is says.

Red Flags also includes her first ceramics, in a series that reworks souvenir figurines of cherubic little Indigenous children. Images of children without their parents were a hallmark of Aboriginalia, and emblematic of the attitudes that allowed the Stolen Generations. In James’ version, each child waves a tiny red flag. One reads ‘WTF,’ which stands for White Trash Fascists. ‘VIPs’ is Violent Invasion Pain.

James says the humour in her work came by instinct. “It’s autobiographical in a way. It’s easy to just say what I want to say if there’s a little joke behind it,” she says. “You know, reeling them in and then smacking them in the face.”

Her sharp wit and use of Aboriginalia puts her into conversation with artists like Karla Dickens, Tony Albert and Destiny Deacon. James also points to the influence of the many artists in her family, including the painter Marlene Gilson and master weaver Tammy Gilson, who have shaped not so much her visual language but how she approaches art making. But the strength of James’ work is often in how she uses familiar textures and cultural references. Her works deliver punchy moments of recognition, whether through the textiles and objects themselves, or through her overturned lyrics, characters, slogans and sayings. Inevitably, audiences are left making connections to their own lives and experiences.

For Red Flags, James has also made a series of pennants, essentially large-scale versions of the printed souvenirs from old country gift shops. James’ pennants ask pointed questions about our noteworthy places and landmarks. One sets the word ‘unsettled’ with a line drawing of Melbourne’s toppled Captain Cook monument. Another announces simply, ‘You are on stolen land.’

There are some very personal connections to place in the exhibition too, especially in the series of Barbie-sized toilet roll dolls holding flags. “There’s Treaty Barbie, and Black Barbie,” James says. “They came about from the exhibition starting in Warrnambool [at the Warrnambool Art Gallery]. I had a lot of aunties or great-aunties that lived in Warrnambool. Going to their houses, you would see toilet roll dolls. That was my memory of Warrnambool and my connection. I wanted to have a little tribute to the older aunties.”

She admits all the flags and pennants in these new works were a surprise. “That somehow came out of nowhere,” she says. But for an artist so at home with textiles, and with so much to say, they seem a natural form of protest.

Kait James: Red Flags
Ararat Gallery TAMA, VIC
Until 16 November 2025

Wangaratta Art Gallery, VIC
24 January 2026—22 March 2026

Orange Regional Gallery, NSW
4 April 2026—14 June 2026

Tamworth Regional Gallery, NSW
27 June 2026—16 August 2026

Flinders University of Art, SA
14 September 2026—18 December 2026

Plimsoll Gallery, TAS
5 June 2027—8 August 2027

Kait James also has work included in:

Sign O’ The Times
Sarah Scout Presents, VIC
1 November—13 December 2025