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 explores the cultural and biological lineages connecting the artist, her partner Roslyn Orlando, and their future child. Through a series of intricately beaded forms and related artefacts, the exhibition considers how heritage, ancestry, and personal history 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 a coded visual language. These narratives are inscribed within three gold-beaded works, each point of beadwork functioning as a node within a broader network of memory, tradition, migration, and cultural transformation.

The exhibition also includes a hand-made kite with a woven glass seed-bead tail listing names, birth dates, and ancestral locations recalled through oral family narratives. The kite evokes official records and public archives, while also foregrounding the intimacy of personal storytelling.

Accompanying the works is a selection of family ephemera — photographs, plant matter, iconography, and symbolic objects — that provide visual cues to the oral narratives embedded in the beadwork. Together, these materials echo the aesthetics of museum display while foregrounding the relationship between personal memory and archival absence.