In February 2025, Arts Centre Melbourne’s forecourt transformed into a bustling hive of creativity and connection with Home Bound, a giant tactile woven art installation by Singaporean multidisciplinary artist Daniel Kok and Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Luke George. Part of the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts (Asia TOPA), the project began with a call for donations of rope and weaving fibres in November last year. During the triennial, Kok and George invited craft specialists, community groups, and members of the public to weave their materials, skills, stories, and histories together in a series of workshops and activities running from 24 February to 10 March 2025.
Described by George as “visibly arresting and very unusual, to be sitting out the front of such a large public arts institution, even quite unruly and something of a kind of rogue infestation in this space,” Home Bound became more than just an art installation — it evolved into a living, dynamic tapestry of community engagement.
At its core, the project used weaving as a metaphor for social interaction, exploring how the threads of our lives intertwine to create a vibrant social fabric. Kok explained to us, “We’re taking metaphoric language very literally. Embedded in the idea of ropes and fibres is this idea that it’s always social, it’s always about people connecting […].”
The project aimed to bring together, through rope, an intersection of communities that might not normally interact. Instead of asking people to define themselves by race or cultural background, Home Bound invited connection through a simple question: “Do you work with rope? Do you have fibres? Come and participate if you have something to do with ropes.”
Ropes are recurring metaphorical stand-ins for connection, tying together people, experiences, cultures, histories, and art forms. Tension, push and pull, being tied up in something, or feeling a knot in your stomach — these sensations became artistic tools for Kok and George.
Beginnings
For the two artists, rope was the catalyst for a decade-long creative partnership (most recently commemorated in their compendium Entanglements, published in October last year). They first met during a residency at the Campbelltown Arts Centre in Western Sydney. Both solo artists at the time, they decided to learn something new together to establish a creative conversation on an equal footing.
This led them to attend a rope bondage class in Sydney, marking the beginning of their collaborative exploration with rope as both a medium and a metaphor for connection. “We were working from this hypothesis that ropes allow for a relationship to be worked on, or create a relationship,” Kok said.
Their first collaborative project, Bunny (first performed 2014) emerged from this shared experience — focusing on how rope and bondage could facilitate understanding and sensing between people. “Bunny […] was very much about rope, bondage as a medium, but also other ways of working with rope and knotting; the movement of rope and its physical properties,” explained George.
Even after their time together at the residency ended, and when physically apart, Kok and George each maintained an independent rope practice with exercises and projects they could develop separately. During the COVID-19 pandemic, their practices evolved further, as both artists began experimenting with macramé and creating objects at home. Informally, Kok named these experiments Home Bound — a name that endured.
Culture and collaboration
When the opportunity for Asia TOPA arose, George suggested reusing the title for their community engagement initiative, in which weaving was to be used as a metaphor for social interaction and connection within the “social fabric” of Melbourne.
Home Bound was conceived as a site-specific and one-off project tailored uniquely to Melbourne and the Asia TOPA context. To Kok, the project, with an approach deeply rooted in community engagement and collaboration, would require a complete reimagining if attempted elsewhere: “At the moment, I couldn’t imagine trying to do this somewhere else.”
He elaborated: “It would mean a full engagement process in another place and then finding out who is there […]. Does this speak to that place in terms of materiality? And how are people working with rope and fibre [there]?”
At Asia TOPA, the concept of the yarning or dialogue circle — an Indigenous practice of collaborative communication — played a significant role in Home Bound, which Kok imagined as a “very elaborate yarning circle.”
If the project were to take place in Singapore, he suggested, the focus might shift to reflect the island’s maritime history: “I would straight away be thinking about Singapore as a shipping hub, right? How we are from different places, connected to this place, [and how] most of our ancestors came by sea. It would be a different context, and maybe a different project.”
As for George, the do-it-yourself and community-based art practices of his upbringing in lutruwita/Tasmania heavily influenced his approach to Home Bound. Formative experiences in grassroots projects, where social engagement and collective creation were central, shaped his vision for an evolving installation that welcomed public participation. This deep-rooted belief in the power of community-driven art underpinned Home Bound’s focus on collaboration and the sharing of materials, skills, and stories.
Loose ends
From the start, Home Bound’s open, socially engaged approach meant that its results would necessarily be unpredictable and dynamic. As Kok expressed at the project’s onset: “I don’t think Home Bound will have a final product, because, even in this iteration, we think of the installation as a constantly changing landscape.”
Anticipating the project’s fluid evolution, the co-artists designed it to embrace the ebb and flow of community participation. During our interview, Kok envisioned how the installation would transform over time, suggesting that “in the beginning, there’ll probably be little rope, and then there’ll be a moment where a lot of people gather and are weaving.” He imagined moments of contrast within the space, from meditative silence to vibrant noise, with bursts of light and energy. “At some point,” he noted, “we [would] start removing things, even as we add[ed] more on.”
By the end of its 15-day run, Arts Centre Melbourne’s forecourt had transformed into a vibrant, expansive artwork in its own right — a tapestry woven with community, connection, collaboration, and co-design. It stood as a testament to the threads that intertwine to form something stronger: a rope, a bond, a shared creation.
At the end of the installation, Kok and George extended an open invitation to art lovers to celebrate the project by unravelling the giant social tapestry and taking a piece home.
This dismantling process was as significant as the creation itself, with Kok describing it as a “systematic way of discarding, disassembly, and disposing of the material that we have worked with.” An intentional approach to unweaving what had been woven underscored Home Bound’s exploration of impermanence and the cyclical nature of community — how connections are formed, experienced, and, ultimately, released.
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Part of the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts (Asia TOPA), Home Bound took place from 24 February – 10 March 2025. Find out more about Daniel Kok at diskodanny.com and Luke George at lukegeorge.net.
This article was created in collaboration with Haymun Win, a food and art writer based in Melbourne, who interviewed the artists.
Header image by Gregory Lorenzutti.
