Hag-ia (2024-2025). Essay by Melinda Rackham.

A Veil Between

Hag-ia insists we pause, asking us to set aside three hours to share an intimate sacred space of connection with our maternal ancestors.

By agreeing to devote this significant period of presence, we cross a threshold into Tarsha Cameron’s experiential immersive circular realm; opening ourselves to in-between moments; arousing memories and emotions; being receptive to what may be revealed. Outside this circle, the gathered are observed recalling tales and whispers of their foremothers through familiar objects, jewellery, textiles, flowers and aromatic herbs; reading and journaling with ink and quill; practicing mindful movement and sharing that enduring social ritual of afternoon tea.

The idea that women think back through our mothers is central to this work, as it is to Virginia Woolf’s ground-breaking century-old essay A Room of One’s Own (1929). As a daughter and granddaughter Cameron explores this concept literally with artifacts and language; and as an artist and performer is nurtured by mother-muses - feminist writers, artists and intellectuals. Emboldened by Italian Marxist Sylvia Federici‘s analysis of capitalism’s violent subjugation of women, she draws on the spectacle of Irish artist Jesse Jones’ corporeally activated installations and the prescience of Australian eco-artist-elder Bonita Ely’s early performances on motherhood.

Hag-ia has grown over eleven iterations in the past year from the multiform installation Embracing Unravelling (2023), creating places to remember matrilineal lineage across Kaurna and Peramangk lands within art, domestic, nature and theatre spaces. Attracting mostly women, peppered with curious men, participants embark on conversations which encompass both private thoughts and their ancestors’ more public tales, customs, and emotional dowries. Some deepen their experience by attending several events, seeking the voice and agency of visible and invisible mother/mater/matter; engaging at each site with the ritual elements of yarn, tales, texts and constructing a spiral path to be mindfully walked.

This is not only a speculative or spiritual quest - it’s as tangible as the installation’s buttons, lace, elastic, ribbon, and fabric Cameron inherited from her mother after her death.  Neither is suggesting the body remembers an abstract concept – mothers’ wombs are part of a breathing living human ecosystem. In the phenomenal microchimeric process of radical exchange, foetal cells pass through the placenta into our mother’s bloodstream after about 4 or 5 weeks of pregnancy to reside in her body.  Remarkably, both male and female cells can stay in her body for days, decades or lifetimes.

These cells are pluripotent - growing into different types of tissue including heart, thyroid, lungs, liver and skin. They can also migrate back into younger siblings in utero, making our matrilineal family bonds even more complex. When our bodies carry cells with a DNA blueprint of older siblings, mothers and their siblings and grandmothers and so on, the idea of individual hermetically sealed, human beings blows open.  We are bonded, attached across generations where women carry the epigenetic baggage – the environmental impacts of life, of trauma, injustices of patriarchy and capitalism, grief and losses – which alters the ways genomes express themselves.

From Virgin Mary to the ancient Spiral Goddess, wombs are the vortex through which life is created: magical thresholds of female power, fertility, manifestation and passages to other worlds. Spiral references cascade, intertwining across biology, culture and science. The double helix of DNA mirrors spiral star systems, Fibonacci sequences and the synapses in our brains. Koru, a Māori spiral depicts new life, growth, strength and peace is the unfurling sprout of Aotearoa’s Silver Fern; the Mayan Hunab Ku spiral symbolises the oneness of all creation; and a healing spiral within the palm of a hand is etched into caves and woven into fabrics across Hopi lands, now known as Arizona.

Cameron’s rock spiral is a two-way street.  You walk in  –  you pause  –  you walk out; connecting with your inner self, returning to your roots, going back to the source to be recreated. Linear time isn’t real, it morphs, looping back on itself, suggesting a broader understanding of our lived experiences. Like many First Nations cultures which view time as a series of interconnecting cycles of past, present, and future; by walking mindfully within this spiral, we can connect-with and pass-through planes of physical and spiritual existence, sensing ourselves within a larger whole.

Imprinted in our DNA, spiral devotion is older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids. In the Irish Newgrange Neolithic Temple, built around 3100 BC, spiral carved stones announce a passageway lit by the sun once a year on the winter solstice. In Gaelic myth, the lochs and lands of Ireland and Scottland were created by boulders thrown down by the Hag Goddess - giantess Cailleach. A most powerful female deity, sometimes depicted with one eye, blue skin, red teeth and skulls around her neck, both creator and destroyer, weaver of life and death, she reigned these lands as Goddess of Winter and the Veiled One for millennia.  Although she has been disappeared in more recent centuries, shelters and rock offerings still appear each spring to enable Cailleach to rest and rejuvenate.

This is the backstory for the penultimate iteration - Hag-ia Cailleach on the grounds of the Cedars, home of Nora Heysen grand-dame of Australian art, during the Heysen Sculpture Biennial (2025). We met within a ring of gums, a faerie circle for remembering, during the fertile darkness of the winter solstice. This is the day, many believe, the veil between the worlds of human and spirt, animal and plant, past and future is at its thinnest.  Immersed in Cameron’s soundscape of interwoven spoken texts in Dutch and English (accented Scottish, Irish and Australian) the chatter, passage and presence of ants, birds, kangaroos, leaves, trees, winds as well as curious Biennial visitors thrusting through the undergrowth; we catch our own women ancestors' voices.

Revelations appear in the ordinary – treasured gifts from grandmothers, memories of care, aunts who saw us and had our back, creative pursuits that saved us. Art does not happen in a vacuum, and Cameron’s emboldened practice, intertwining memoir, his/herstory, theory and matter, summons others to join in an embodied quest to understand her matrilineal line despite the twists and erasures of patriarchal capitalism.  And through attentiveness, a reverence for slowness, listening to herself and others, she has traced her connection to Cailleach’s worshipers from the Galician priestess cult in the Iberian Peninsula, through the Milesian invaders of Ireland, to the Caledonians settling in Cameron’s Scottish ancestral lands.

As an adopted woman, forcibly removed from my mother at birth, who has spent weeks, months and years searching for my legally erased biological heritage, Cameron’s artwork - awakening emotional, physical and spiritual ancestral journeying - resonates deeply within me. After an early Hag-ia I was drawn to buy a camellia to plant for my deceased mother. By the time of Cailleach Hag-ia it was blooming in my front garden - a palpable connection to her through delicate variegated white and deep pink flowers pressing against lush dark green leaves.

Hag-ia Femina marks the twelfth iteration and end of this year-long cycle, and yet it is just a moment in the spiral realms of constant change – embodying memory, retelling tales of the mothers, connecting generations, touching the natural world, dissolving boundaries. This still point calls for reflection of the pathways we have all trodden to bring our fragmented selves here. Infused with the aroma of sheoaks and soundscapes drawn from the years’ events, Cameron invites us again to both tell and twine our tales into the threads of a collective circle of yarns.

Together in interconnected ecosystems of art, community and place, the veil lifts, transformation occurs and deep knowing arises from fathomless time.

Melinda Rackham

July 2025

Kaurna Yerta

Tarsha Cameron, Hag-ia (2024-2025)

5 events – SALA Festival 2024 – Goodwood Theatres and Studios

1 event  – Nature Festival – Belair National Park

1 event  – Cameron’s Home

2 events – Adelaide Fringe - The Mill - Winning Best Adelaide Fringe Festival Award 2025                    for Visual Arts and Design

1 event  – History Festival - The Adelaide Irish Club

1 event  – Heysen Sculpture Biennial – with Hag-ia Cailleach during the Winter Solstice

1 event  – SALA Festival 2025 – Good Bank Gallery, McLaren Vale