Island Welcome

Artist list

Liv Boyle, Jess Dare, Anna Davern, Helen Clara Hemsley, Kath Inglis, Inari Kiuru, Vicki Mason, Belinda Newick, Lauren Simeoni, Manon van Kouswijk

By hosting this exhibition at Polygon Artspace in Frederiksberg, in collaboration with local artist Helen Clara Hemsley, we hope to explore similarities with Danish immigration policy. Drawing on the welcome garlands given in many traditional island cultures, and drawing inspiration from jewellery history and practice, each artist has created a necklace, lei or garland that interprets the theme of welcome, while also considering immigration policies and their interpretation and impact on newly arrived immigrants around the world.

Island Welcome provides for the inclusion of diverse yet collegiate voices, making objects that predominantly share a dialogue with the body and communicate at a physical level. There is an insight and intrinsic material specificity that each artist brings to the making process, informed by years of tacit knowledge.

The exhibition engages with the universal human rights and the capacity to extend gestures of welcome that address global displacement. Through the language of narrative jewellery, the intimate relationship between artefact and body, transmits meaning and an opportunity to convey empathy, compassion, and care for those seeking asylum and new beginnings.

Via this gentle activist enactment, the artists present their gestures of welcome, thereby contributing to the political, social, and cultural currency of our shared humanity



Artist Talk: Friday, 11 Sept. 2026, 4:00 - 4:30 pm
Belinda Newick (curator/artist) and Helen Clara Hemsley (artist) will discuss how Island Welcome uses jewellery art as a political tool to discuss immigration policy in both an Australian and Danish context. (Artist talk in English).

Opening: Friday, 11 Sept. 2026, 4:30 - 7:00 pm.