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| The World's Worst Wagga Guild, group photo 2026 |
Fiona Waters, Ruby Hoppen, Emma Louise Hayman, Lois Waters and Owen Lewis, are a group of textile artists from different cities, their collective, The World's Worst Wagga Guild aims to democratise art, foster community, and champion undervalued textile practices. Their collaboration brings together textile-led multidisciplinary artists in an ongoing exchange of skills, techniques and knowledge. They believe that giving it your ‘worst’ can in fact be giving it your ‘best’ – this is why the Guild was named after the 'World's Worst Wagga' - a quilt declared the worst in the world, but is now an important piece of Australian quilting history. The World's Worst Wagga Guild was established in 2023 on unceded Wurundjeri Land by Fiona Waters and Ruby Hoppen. Since then they have expanded interstate and exhibited together in Sydney 2024, Melbourne 2025, and Canberra 2026. worldsworstwagga.com
A "wagga" is a uniquely Australian scrap quilt, traditionally made by drovers and swagmen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These sturdy quilts were an essential part of their swags, made by the swagmen themselves from Wagga Wagga Flour Mill flour sacks, featuring the decorative Wagga Wagga Flour Mill logo.
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Fiona Waters, My bellybutton is down here, 2025, scrap fabric |
" ... During our residency at Gunyah, we plan to experiment, refine ideas, reflect on our first three exhibitions and to plan our fourth. We will develop an ambitious large-scale collaborative work that previously hasn't been possible with our collective working across different cities. We’ll experiment with shared processes, build modular quilted and sculptural components, and explore new ways of presenting our work. The residency will function as a studio laboratory to refine ideas for our next exhibition and collective direction. ..."
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| Fiona Waters, Knees, 2025. Scrap fabric. |
Fiona Waters is one of the co-founders of The World's Worst Wagga Guild. Fi is a queer settler Gemini living and working on unceded Wurundjeri Land. Fi's quilts contribute to the radical histories of scrap quilt-making on this continent, with a focus on making do with what you have, recycling, and textile arts telling stories of self, and community. Fi considers the gendered narratives about textile art, quilting and domestic items and the need for straight lines, neatness and perfection. This 'straightness' is counteracted and 'queered' with the wonky lines and scrap fabric. Humour, nostalgia, and old blankets infused with community history speak to connection, sexuality, gender, and identity.
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| Ruby Hoppen, St Brigid's Shroud, 2024. Scrap fabric |
Ruby Hoppen is one of the co-founders of The World's Worst Wagga Guild. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne, on Wurundjeri Land, where she explores identity and feminism through the production of textile works. Her work interrogates the experience of living with a visible difference and single motherhood. The old world and the new are often difficult to reconcile, her objective is to resolve and stitch together these two frayed components and make them stronger in coexistence. Her work scrutinises the cultural and socio-political inconsistencies within officially documented textile history.
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| Emma Louise Hayman, Untitled (good omen), 2025. Glazed ceramic, cotton rope, dowel. |
Emma Louise Hayman is a ceramic, textile, and performance artist, living and creating on unceded Bidjigal Land, Lugarno, NSW. Their work navigates ideas of place, memory, belonging, and the concept of home, approaching materials intuitively and seeing art-making as playful, and an inherent human need. With a deep interest in local folklore, unexplained phenomena, personal mythologies and outsider art, they are drawn to kitsch, sentimental objects that sit on the edge of taste and comfort. Emma Louise believes use of traditional domestic mediums and ‘craft-based’ practises can become a political and feminist act, reclaiming and elevating overlooked materials within the contemporary art world.
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| Lois Waters, Bend, 2025. Found fabric, cotton thread. |
Lois Waters is a hard of hearing artist living on Gadigal Wangal land, who uses printmaking and textile processes to visualise her experience of sound. She is interested in what materials can and can’t do, as a parallel for the limits and possibilities of the body. Gently undulating, dissolving, or bent and strange, her textile forms consider how the materials of the body can reform to generate new sensory experiences. Her work mobilises printmaking and textile practices to reframe her experience of hearing loss, and capture associated shifts in the perception of external and internal sounds.
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| Owen Lewis, detail, 2026, fabric and plastic |
Owen Lewis is an arts worker and artist, working mainly in sculpture, living on Wangal Dharug Land. He explores a wide range of materials with particular focus on plaster, found objects and textiles. Owen's works are tangible meditations on life cycles with each piece becoming an artefact of the perpetual processes of decay, preservation and creation.
