On a spring afternoon in regional East Gippsland, a clothesline turned slowly in the breeze. Its metal arms creaked softly, the sound fading into the quiet of the yard. For most Australians, it would have passed unnoticed — just another rhythm of suburban life. For Aldona Kmieć, newly arrived from Poland, that moment marked a beginning.
In that unremarkable backyard, she first saw the Hills Hoist — “rusty, noisy and rotating in the wind,” as she later described it — and began to imagine how an object so ordinary could hold the weight of memory. The rotary clothesline, long a fixture of Australian backyards, became for her a bridge between two worlds: the rural Poland she had left behind and the new life she was building here.
From that small encounter grew a sustained body of work. Her exhibition Hills Hoist opens 12 November – 7 December 2025 at City Library Gallery in Flinders Lane, supported by the City of Melbourne Arts Grant 2025. The project brings together digital and analogue photography with cyanotype textile works made between Australia and Poland. In Kmieć’s words, it is “a quiet act of determination — to preserve identity, memory and tradition across distance and time.”
The farm that stays
Kmieć was born in southern Poland and grew up in a rural community during the final years of communism. “Our family, like many others, carried the scars of war,” she has said. “Those early years taught me to find beauty in everyday moments and to appreciate the power of storytelling.”
When she moved to Australia, that rhythm shifted. The scale of the country, the quality of its light, the silence of its afternoons — everything felt new. Yet the rotary clothesline in her neighbour’s yard seemed oddly familiar. Invented in Adelaide in the 1940s, the Hills Hoist had become a symbol of post-war optimism: a mechanical halo of domestic order, spinning endlessly above the backyard lawn. For Kmięć, it echoed the cycle of her childhood chores — a visual rhyme between two very different landscapes.
The photographs that make up Hills Hoist look back to her family’s farm. Shot over two years, they record daily life “under increasing economic and existential pressures”, as she puts it. The tone is steady and unsentimental: peeling paint, fields under frost, the patient gestures of work. “I didn’t want to romanticise what a working farm looks like,” she says. “There’s melancholy in their stillness, but also endurance.”
Each image feels like a quiet note of insistence — that ordinary life matters, that the labour of staying deserves to be seen.
Light, fabric and return
In 2025 Kmieć returned to Poland for an artist residency that allowed her to extend the project beyond photography. Working with her sister, she produced a series of cyanotypes on found household fabrics — the same cloths that had once hung on their family line. Using sunlight and iron salts, they exposed family photographs directly onto the fabric.
“These fabric works,” she writes, “extend the photographic image into touch and material memory — European sunlight imprinted directly onto the cloths that once hung on our family line.”
The choice of process is deliberate. The cyanotype, one of photography’s oldest methods, records light as deep blue shadow. It preserves not just an image but a trace — a residue of exposure. By printing on fabrics marked by years of domestic use, Kmięć turns the act of art-making into an act of care.
Her practice aligns with a broader shift in contemporary photography towards material and process: artists who use pre-digital techniques to emphasise time, tactility and imperfection. Yet Kmięć’s approach remains distinctively personal. The cyanotypes are not abstract experiments but physical translations of memory — sunlight meeting fabric, image meeting touch.
Re-framing a suburban icon
In Australia, the Hills Hoist is both ordinary and mythic. Patented in 1945, it became a cornerstone of the suburban dream: the spinning sign of cleanliness, prosperity and domestic order. Its shape is embedded in the nation’s visual memory — part engineering marvel, part cultural shorthand.
Kmieć sees it through a different lens. “While the Hoist might look quintessentially Australian,” she says, “I’m looking at it as an outsider observing a national symbol.” From that distance, she recognises another story: “It was part of the dream of progress — the suburban block, the nuclear family, the white picket fence. But that dream didn’t include everyone.”
By centring her project on this piece of backyard machinery, Kmięć re-examines what the Australian dream looks like when seen from its margins. The Hoist, weathered and rusting, becomes a quiet witness to change — a domestic device that has turned through generations of washing, sunlight and migration. Its endless rotation mirrors the slow persistence of belonging itself.
Her approach resonates with other Australian photographers who explore displacement and identity — figures such as Hoda Afshar, Atong Atem and Tammy Law — yet Kmięć’s tone remains her own. Her photographs are neither political statement nor nostalgic tribute. They speak through restraint, allowing the ordinary to carry its own gravity.
The persistence of care
Now based in Melbourne, Kmięć has built a practice that bridges conceptual and documentary forms. Her earlier work explored resilience and community through portraiture and site-specific installation. Hills Hoist gathers those threads and knots them close to home. It is a story of care — for family, for land, for a way of life slowly vanishing.
In an interview with M-ARTLENS, she reflected on how migration reshaped her sense of self:
That sense of listening defines the work. Hills Hoist is built not from spectacle but from patience — from the slow attention that allows meaning to emerge. In documenting her family’s persistence, Kmięć finds a broader metaphor for what it means to make a life across borders. The Hoist turns, the fabric lifts, and the work of memory continues.
Her practice also speaks to the ethics of maintenance — the unseen labour that holds communities together. In the mythology of Australian suburbia, the Hoist once stood for progress and self-reliance. In Kmięć’s hands, it stands for something humbler and perhaps more profound: endurance.
Questions of identity
Hills Hoist arrives at a time when Australian photography is increasingly engaged with questions of identity and belonging. Exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum of Australian Photography and the Ballarat International Foto Biennale have foregrounded artists who examine migration through personal histories. Kmięć adds to that conversation by shifting the focus from movement to continuity. Her work asks what it means not just to leave or to arrive, but to keep going.
The City of Melbourne’s support for the project recognises that contribution. In a city shaped by waves of migration, her dual perspective — grounded in both the Polish countryside and the Australian suburb — speaks to a shared experience. Her images remind us that the domestic and the diasporic are not opposites but parts of the same story.
At its core, Hills Hoist is an act of remembrance. It honours the small gestures that hold families together — the folding of cloth, the tending of land, the patience to stay. It suggests that art, like laundry, is a form of repetition: a way of keeping what matters in circulation.
The quiet act of staying
Kmieć’s photographs do not shout. They linger. In their quietness lies an ethic of care — an insistence that attention itself can be an act of love. “This body of work,” she writes, “is a quiet act of determination — to preserve identity, memory and tradition across distance and time.”
As the exhibition opens in Melbourne, the real Hills Hoists of suburbia will keep turning — laundry rising and falling in the wind, sunlight bleaching fabric, rust deepening on the arms. In their ordinary motion, Kmięć finds poetry: the repetition that keeps a life together.
Hills Hoist is not a monument to what has been lost, but to what endures. It turns gently between two skies, carrying with it the sound of a language, a memory, and the endless work of belonging.
Exhibition details
Aldona Kmieć: Hills Hoist
Venue: City Library Gallery, Level 1, 253 Flinders Lane, Melbourne VIC 3000
Dates: 13 November – 7 December 2025
Opening & Artist Talk: Thursday 13 November | 5:30 – 7:00 pm
Supported by: City of Melbourne Arts Grant 2025 and Lifestyle Clotheslines
More information: aldonakmiec.com
, the exhibition blends analogue and digital photography with cyanotype textiles to trace memory, land and love across two worlds.){kind=link}