Maverick milliner Metta makes her own rules

LOCAL artist Metta Henderson, featured in the latest Port Stephens Community Arts Centre exhibition, has been a milliner for many years.

Metta has a diploma in Applied Fashion, Technology and Millinery, and she is involved in a large variety of creative activities: fabric manipulation, felt making, weaving, and embroidery, just to name a few.

Metta’s creations are completely unique, so much so that she grows her own plants specifically to use them for weaving.

Her pieces in the Botanicals and Printmakers exhibition, which ran until 21 July, were an assortment of colourful hats, bags, and baskets, all made using natural fabrics, fibres, and dyes.

It’s a months-long process, involving harvesting, retting, dying, constructing, but most of all necessitates creativity and a novel approach,” Ms Henderson said.

“There’s no book, no documentation, no research, so I had to do my own,” she said. “It’s all new, no one else is doing it.”

Metta harvests leaves from plants like lomandras, gymeas and cabbage trees, which she had to learn how to utilise from scratch.

While taking care not to damage them, she splits them to the desired size and weaves them together.

To meet her specific needs, she went as far as teaming up with the woodworkers at the Centre to create a machine that precisely cuts the leaves into strips.

Metta’s collaboration with the woodworkers, coupled with the dissatisfaction from existing products, also led her to create her own hat blocks, which she uses to shape many of her women’s hats.

“A lot of the blocks that you buy online are designed for men,” she said.

Her collection also includes items directed at children, which she feels are usually left out, such as colourful small hats that can be turned around to use as bags.

While the Botanical and Printmakers exhibition has ended, the new Black and White and Polymer Clay exhibition will replace it until 15 September.

By Nico LOMBARDO