Three Hats and a Single Thread

Published on 18 September 2026

Story: Lizzie Macaulay, Bigger Picture Business Solutions. Photo: Cody Fox, Cleva Media

 The first thing a Karee S Dahl work does is pull your eye. Dense, luminous centres of colour appear to expand and dissolve into the fields around them, shifting and vibrating as you move. Then you notice the surface is thread, looped and layered by hand into something that sits between a drawing and a painting. "Each person looking at it will see and read it differently," she says. "My only hope is they just look for a moment, and maybe in years to come it will revisit their memory."

Dahl is one of nine Wide Bay Burnett artists in this year's Regional Spotlight at Hervey Bay Regional Gallery, and she comes at art from three directions at once. She is an artist, an advocate for the way artists are valued, and by profession an art profiler, a cultural manager who has spent years brokering and consulting across the art world. All three feed the same conviction, but the thread comes first.

Her Regional Spotlight work is drawn from an ongoing body she calls A Drawing a Day, "a sustained meditative practice in which repetition becomes a means of navigating chaos." Asked to explain what drawing with thread actually means, she offers an image everyone can follow: "Think of holding a pen to paper and, without letting the pen leave the page, draw continuous circles and odd figure eights all over the page for two hours," she says. "Then magically blow air into the pen line and pump it to 0.5mm in diameter." The line never lifts. It simply accumulates.

That idea of drawing as something elastic, not tied to pencil and paper, took hold early, when Dahl found charcoal in life drawing classes and came to see drawing as "just a push or pull of one object on a surface." Two artists shaped what came next, both now gone. Textile artist Rosemary Lakerink worked from knitting, and the late Singapore artist Juliana Yasin drew her into collaborative performance, and deconstructing garments for that work left her surrounded by balls of thread that led her back to drawing. "Ro and Julie are a massive part of where I am today with my practice," she says. "It is very lonely without them."

The making is slow, and Dahl has a particular way of surviving it. A phone sits nearby playing a television series, and she threads deep into the night, barely watching it. Anything she might want to see for its own sake is ruled out. "I never see the series as I am watching the thread," she says. "It's really just listening to the dialogue." What carries her is the same pull that carries any binge-watcher, just one more episode, until "five episodes later I have maybe finished a work and I am crawling to bed at 3 or 4am."

There is something older underneath the late nights. Dahl grew up without a television, on comics, ragtime piano and her father's Slim Dusty, and with his standing instruction that "everything you do must be productive." The habit stuck so thoroughly that switching the telly on still feels faintly illicit. Threading settles it. "The thread reels in my thought processes," she says, and the work keeps teaching her the same lesson, which is to stop steering. "The calm is when one realises there is no sense in control. Control is detrimental. It is best to work with the thread, a collaboration I guess."

Her recent subjects are the things most of us stop noticing, pegs, water tanks, oil drums and taps, the ordinary contents of an Australian backyard. They are drawn from everyday life, and Dahl builds a second layer underneath. The peg series began with pegs scattered on the lawn under her clothesline and a passing thought about "a peg or two missing these days," before opening out into wordplay, from tent pegs to JPEGs to currencies pegged to the US dollar. The water tanks and drums carry more weight. "Humans can exist without oil, but our bodies are approximately 60% water," she says. "Civilisations cannot survive without water."

Beauty, in her hands, comes with an argument. "There is also a hidden agenda," she says. "These objects can reveal, if one really wants to delve into a little research." Home is the Fraser Coast, her partner's home region, where the couple returned each year through two decades overseas until a Christmas visit in 2016 quietly became permanent. Coming back sharpened her eye for what Australians take for granted. She noticed high-vis everywhere, "it seems to have become Australia's national dress," and made a series of it, before turning to two kangaroos that moved into her yard during a dry spell, rendered in coloured thread and lounging with a "chill, no worries mate" ease. The same imagery has since turned sombre, documenting roadside kills marked with a high-vis cross, which she has learned signals that the animal has been checked for a joey. The local palette runs through all of it, those red, pink, orange and purple sunsets and the glassy blue-whites of winter water, colours so particular she often sources thread from overseas to match them.

Those overseas years, mostly in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, still shape how she works. Abroad she worked alongside other artists constantly, on performances, festivals and social commentary, and felt the loss on returning to a solo studio. "It was possibly like an only child suddenly finding a new extended family," she says of the scene she found in Southeast Asia, where artists "weren't fighting to be better than one another." The method was to give up control, much as she now does with the thread. "You let go and dive into a big pot or washing machine and see what comes of it." That loss stayed with her. "I miss our Singapore days."

It was in Singapore that the advocate and the art profiler took shape. Watching grants there pay for the making of work but not for the living, money that "didn't leave anything for an artist to pay their rent, feed themselves," Dahl went back to university to understand how an artist could run a practice as a business. Underneath the practical argument sits a bigger one. An artist, she believes, produces far more than the work on the wall. A maker in the room changes how everyone around them thinks, bringing new eyes to problems that have nothing to do with art, and that spillover of fresh thinking is part of why she believes artists should be paid properly.

Her favourite illustration is the compact disc, whose 74-minute length is widely traced to Sony's Norio Ohga, a trained opera singer who insisted the format be long enough to hold Beethoven's Ninth Symphony without a break. Put a musician in the room and the product changes. She points to the economics too, with cultural and creative activity contributing $70.3 billion to the Australian economy in 2024–25, around 2.5 per cent of GDP. "Art is business," she says, "a legitimate and contributing work sector." For all that, the studio is still where she would rather be. "I would rather just be in the studio, but to do that one has to earn an income, which means one has to also be manager, marketer, accountant and pack-and-send specialist."

What she wants next is scale, and time. She would love "a large-scale commission somewhere," a work big enough, and up long enough, that she can live with it, step away and come back to rethink it, the slow kind of looking her intricate, hand-built pieces are made for. A new body of work is taking shape too, the World Analogy series, built on small parables like the one about a tractor that keeps running out of water. You refill it, then carry a spare tank, then rig the spare to feed the first, and still it runs dry, until the obvious question arrives. "Maybe you need to check to see if there is a leak somewhere and try to fix the leak?" During the exhibition she will also lead a collaborative mark-making workshop at the gallery, twelve people and a morning together, everyone working a line.

This story appears in the October 2026 edition of Fraser Coast Scene, our monthly guide to What's On across our Cultural Services venues.