Settlement and Refuge

Settlement and Refuge is a materially grounded visual meditation on exile, tracing the psychological and relational consequences of forced migration. Through symbolic forms, devotional iconography, and layered collage, the project explores survivors guilt, longing for reunification, and the quiet rituals by which displaced lives seek refuge and meaning.

I am a naturalised immigrant and former asylum seeker whose practice investigates the lived experience of immigration at intimate and societal scales, and the narratives that circulate around movement, belonging and displacement. Practising on the unceded lands of First Nations peoples, my work is informed by a persistent awareness of settler colonial histories and the urgent challenges of decolonisation within Australia and beyond. That ethical tension—the friction between pursuing my own human rights and recognising the ongoing dispossession of others—sits at the core of my artistic enquiry. I transfigure internal states of exile into tangible objects, deploying collage, printmaking, archival material and light to build an aesthetic, conceptual and narrative system of coordinates. These works operate as documents, devotional objects and provisional maps that negotiate political, social and cultural terrains made volatile by migration, offering a patient, process‑centred praxis that foregrounds labour, memory and mutual responsibility.

Drawing on the shared cultural and historical heritage that binds me to my sister, Settlement and Refuge unfolds where severed visual genealogies meet, deploying a hybrid grammar drawn from Russian Orthodox iconography and Soviet avant‑garde practice to articulate the fractured inheritance that binds me and my sister together. These traditions supply a dense symbolic vocabulary and a methodological scaffold: geometric simplification, symbolic compression, mediated reproduction, and the austere clarity of graphic constructivist logic operate alongside the liturgical logic of icons, ritualised surfaces, and devotional scale. Rather than negating their historical antagonism, the work intentionally holds these lineages in tension, using repetition and iteration as forms of ritual labour that both preserve and reconfigure inherited forms. Through collage, stencil spray-painting, and archival ephemera, I strive to produce objects that function simultaneously as devotional images and critical documents images that confess, witness, and archive the socio‑political conditions of displacement while enacting a mode of care through making.

Instagram: @vinnieswarze