Double Happiness

2025
salvaged wire, metal, fabric, and croqueted yarn
155 x 51 x 41 cm, 5 kg

Double Happiness is a wearable artwork that weaves my family’s postwar migration story together with Australia’s ongoing struggles around labour, displacement, and the shadow economy of tobacco. My Sicilian family migrated to Australia in the 1960s seeking stability after the devastation of the Second World War and the loss of their young daughter, Sarina, my namesake. Like many newly-arrived migrants, they laboured on a Wangaratta tobacco farm in hopes of building a new beginning. Instead, they lost their investmen. My father lost his right eye in a farm accident at the age of 13 — another wound carried into adulthood.

The title refers to Australia’s contemporary illegal tobacco trade, a violent crisis marked by firebombings, exploitation, and community harm. By placing past and present side by side, the work asks how cycles of risk and sacrifice echo across generations.

Handwoven from salvaged wire, crocheted yarn, and repurposed fabric, the piece incorporates symbolic tobacco leaves and red blossoms. Completed and photographed on Anzac Day 2025, those red forms also resonate with the poppy, linking migrant endurance to remembrance, service, and the comradeship I have known through my own military experience.

Kneeling in this work, I honour those who endured, adapted, and rebuilt, even when the cost was profound.