Caelli Brooker Designs the 2024 Festival Program

The artwork for the 2024 Newcastle Writers Festival program was designed by Caelli Jo Brooker, a Newcastle artist and designer with cultural ties to Wangaaypuwan and Kawambarai Country in Central West NSW. She works in research and teaching at the Wollotuka Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Newcastle.

Caelli created a series of illustrations for this year’s festival and said;

Text and textiles share the same Latin origin; the verb ‘textere’, which means ‘to weave’.

Inspired by fabric as a storytelling device, the images for the 2024 Newcastle Writers Festival are conceived as a series of local vignettes that combine to form a playful contemporary Newcastle toile, or cloth. Individually, these small scenes are glimpses of readers, listeners, subjects, and storytellers, and collectively they weave a storied fabric of people, place, Country, and culture.

You can learn more about Caelli at www.caellijobrooker.com/