There is an inevitability to Tais Rose Wae. Whether weaving with words or threads, the Australian poet and artist possesses a depth that winds around and the works she sends out into the world. Moving between the pillars of rhythm and restraint, her work takes on an almost transcendent consciousness, deeply rooted in her surrounds to propel her words and weavings. 

Infused with a deep spirituality, one tied to the natural world, her pieces lie between the ethereal and the ordinary. Crafting a world moving seamlessly between place and time. 

As a child, Tais wrote by the riverbed. Immortalising the trees, the moss, and the water. After studying literature at university, she began her creative practice first as a writer, and in 2023 she published her debut poetry collection, Riverbed Sky Songs (that went on to win the 2024 Kenneth Slessor NSW Premier’s Literary Award) soon after the birth of her first son, Miro. 

On Sharing the Same Breath

Parallel to her writing, Tais’s work as a weaver shares a resonant sensibility with her poetry. “Poetry and weaving seem to almost share the same breath,” she says, “both practices grew from the same place, an experimental way of making experience tangible.” And there certainly is this evergreen materiality to her work, a feeling of something deeper to grab hold of. Her words and weavings anchored in their abstractions through a singular specificity. “In weaving, it is warp and weft, the back and forth, while in poetry, it is the words that are said and those that are withheld. Both teach me how to stay with something long enough for meaning to surface.”

Between the Mountains and the Sea

Growing up, she spent much of her time outdoors, guided by the tenet that nature is both alive and relational. It's telling, then, that her home lies nestled between mountains and the sea, with the elevation and open sky creating a palette for her works. Residing in the uplands of the Northern Rivers on Bundjalung Country along Australia’s east coast, Tais lives a life fully immersed in nature with her husband, Heath, a fellow artist, and their two sons, Milo and Amias. Viewing nature as a collaborative partner in her work, she remarks how “it informs my palette, my pacing, my sense of scale and self.” 

Care as a Creative Force

A staunch believer in reciprocity, Tais sees “care as a creative force in making beauty from what is already here” so it comes as no surprise that shells, seaweed, linen, silks, gold and silver are often woven through both of her mediums with words and threads. “The weavings become a reverent home in which to become mesmerised by these small perfect moments in nature, like the formation of a pearl beneath the surface of the sea. The pearl hangs from the weaving which was shaped around its existence; the poem imagines the inner world of its miraculous becoming beneath the sea.”

Stepping into Tais’s world – through her home, her works, and glimpses of her life through her Instagram feed – there’s a clear feeling that she stands in a decidedly other realm. One that is slower, more considerate. Tais credits her upbringing as what framed her perspective, giving her a respect for making things last, to be both resourceful and practical. “Being raised by and around people with big hearts and very little money shaped my sense of value and how I live with what I have,” she notes.  

Making Things that Last

We speak on the growing movement towards traditional working methods and crafts in Denmark and Tais feels similarly in Australia – “there is a longing for tactility, for making things that last, for the human touch. I think it is ultimately a response to digital saturation and disposability and I really celebrate this return. The profundity of learning the skill, the joy of something made with intention and integrity.”

This sensibility extends to her style. Deliberate and tactile, Tais populates her wardrobe with meaningful, carefully considered pieces with the aim to last for decades. “The texture of a fabric is really important to me, how a fabric feels on the body and how it wears over time. I think that there is a growing awareness of how synthetic materials are not only detrimental to the planet, but for our bodies too.”

Pragmatic in her approach to dress, Tais finds herself reaching for simple yet well-made pieces – barrel-leg trousers in crisp organic cottons, knitted vests to wear over dresses, and mid-length skirts with woollen socks in winter. 

“I am unwavering in my need for comfort and often opt for garments with a bit of room to move comfortably through my day. During the average day I am up with the sun, in the garden, by the river, wiping mud from little feet, in the kitchen, and, if I am lucky, at the loom for a moment. If I lived in a city, it would be different, but I don’t.”

Many of her pieces carry a memory, collected on her travels, “it is beautiful to be transported back to really formative moments of travel with my family from over the years through these pieces. My husband also often surprises me with beautiful dresses and has excellent taste, the Taurus artist that he is, and they are all very special to me.”

Maps of Lineage

Tais’s work is greatly guided by what she calls “maps of lineage”, speaking to the interconnectivity between generations, landscape, and between what is immaterial and tangible. “My work is a way of seeking to listen backward and forward all at once,” she explains, “I am drawn to what we inherit beyond names and stories. My lineage helps me understand where I stand in this continuum, and what I carry forward alongside my children.”

To Tais, identity isn’t rigid but inhabited, never resolving, and carried forward through time. 
She speaks of her Aboriginal ancestry with candour, much of it, she says “carries great complexity and, in more recent generations since the colonisation of this country, is steeped in trauma," she adds “yet the people I come from are a deep pool of strength from which I draw my deepest inspirations.” 

Motherhood, she reflects, served to heighten that awareness of lineage. “[Motherhood] changed me at a cellular level,” she says, “it brought me into a deeper relationship with time and care, altering the scale and texture of my days.”

Care as Something Sacred

Again, Tais returns to the idea of care as something sacred: “to shape the magic and memory of childhood is an honour, and to do so in safety is a privilege that will never be lost on me.”

On what she would like to pass on to future generations, Tais hopes to pass on the understanding that creativity is inseparable from how we live. That it “resides in attention, in how we notice and respond to the world as it is. To stay with complexity, to make meaning when it matters, and to live carefully in relation to the earth and to one another.”

Indeed.