They farmed tapioca, oranges and rice
Australian Design Centre, 2023
Developed in residence at Bundanon Trust
Supported by Creative Australia

They farmed tapioca, oranges and rice is a body of work that poetically explores cultural and biological lineages linking the artist and her partner, Roslyn Orlando, with their future child. Through a series of intricately beaded forms and related artefacts, the exhibition considers how heritage, ancestry, and personal histories are transmitted, experienced, and narrated.

Drawing on oral histories from three matriarchal lines — encompassing Thai, Laotian, Cambodian, Dai, Greek and Cypriot cultures — Laddawan translates fragments of these stories into coded visual language. These stories are inscribed within three gold‑beaded works, each point of beadwork serving as a node in a broader network of memory, tradition, migration, and cultural transformation.

The exhibition includes a hand‑made kite with a woven glass seed‑bead tail that lists names, birth dates and ancestral locations recalled through oral family narratives. The kite symbolises official records and public archives, juxtaposed with the intimacy of personal storytelling — a tension that underpins the project.

Accompanying these works is a selection of family ephemera — photographs, plant matter, iconography, and symbolic objects — which provide visual cues to the oral narratives embedded in the beadwork. This assemblage echoes the aesthetics of museum displays while foregrounding the interplay between personal memory and archival absence.