Danish Quapoor is an Australian inter-disciplinary visual artist, based in Gurambilbarra/Townsville. He navigates identity, relationships, religion and sexuality to create works across woven textiles, illustrative painting, and ceramics, with further exploration into photography, animation, murals and collage. Quapoor’s recent achievements include four solo exhibitions: redux (Firstdraft), delphic (KEPK x Melt festival) and good grief (Townsville City Galleries) in 2024, and departed (Artspace Mackay) in 2025. In addition to placing as a finalist in both the Gosford Art Prize and North Queensland Ceramic Awards, Quapoor won the 2024 Percival Photographic Portrait Prize.
Quapoor’s tightly wound, presented by Metro Arts and Firstdraft, is a cathartic collection of works created in response to recent and historical upheavals in the artist’s life. These include Quapoor’s father’s unexpected passing, the artist’s “unwelcome” coming out to his family as bisexual, and his exploration of expected heteronormative gender roles. The exhibition consists of nine hand-built sculptural pieces, each incorporating the natural textile of baling twine, a central and significant motif in Quapoor’s practice. The result is an honest, vulnerable display of the artist’s introspective mindset.
Baling twine is a clear through-line of tightly wound, featured across each work and ranging from shades of neon pink and yellow to natural beiges and whites. This material holds nostalgic and symbolic importance for Quapoor, as it references baling lucerne hay, a farming activity he shared with his father as a child; some of the twine used in the works has been repurposed from the family farm. This twine, which Quapoor refers to as “a humble material”, plays an intentional and symbolic role throughout the works. The artist’s grief following the loss of his father is central to this exhibition, the repetition in coiling and shaping the sculptures a form of catharsis and memorialisation to his father.
For Quapoor, the repetitive coiling (and time spent on this process) is personally important. He typically has an idea of a work’s form at the start of the process; however, his creative process, which requires a significant amount of time and effort, allows each work to subtly emerge and evolve. This intentional, deliberate practice allows space for both introspection and extrospection, leading Quapoor to consider an array of topics, such as his own tendency to be “tightly strung”, as well as his frustrations with current political and climate crises. As a result, there are almost always multiple catalysts and concepts embedded in Quapoor’s works. tightly wound is the result of “trying to bring those threads together into an abstracted or stylised form”. The focus on textile works in tightly wound stems from Quapoor’s intent on having a different material focus with a new exhibition, alongside his interest in exploring differing forms of media.
The circular forms in works such as you are my son-shine, pit of despair and tumour target embody the laborious process of working with baling twine, as viewers can envision Quapoor’s grief and memorialisation stitched into each coil. The three-dimensionality of the works, displayed without glass coverings, invites Quapoor’s audience to immerse themselves in all angles of his practice and emotion, and emphasises the tactility of the form. In conversation with this reviewer, Quapoor discusses the intent behind the three-dimensionality of his works:
“For pit of despair, I wanted to give the impression of a seemingly endless black hole, which along with the title was an homage to grief and to my dad… that work as a concave void was also a counterpoint to the convex you are my son-shine, which had more positive connotations related to my mum, but also bittersweet connotations, considering unconditional versus artificial light, warmth and love, and reflections on my unwelcome coming out to my family as bisexual”.
Quapoor succeeds in displaying this contrasting narrative across his works, showing his conflicting relationships and experiences in navigating identity, discovery and loss within his family through structure, material and the use of colour. Quapoor states:
“I am purposeful with [colour’s] use and its relationship to the works. Within good grief [Quapoor’s 2024 series and exhibition which included some of the works displayed in tightly wound], I had a series of black and white works which were most directly related to the grief from my dad’s passing, and prior memories and reflections in the wake of that loss, so for me the black works were purposefully more sombre. tumour target was intentionally pink because it was referencing a kind of tumour and a kind of target (as a personal allegory and reflection).”
Quapoor’s work further explores connotations regarding textiles and gender roles alongside the artist’s own identity as a bisexual man. Weaving, textiles and the colour choices featured in tightly wound are traditionally seen as ‘feminine’, yet are recontextualised within tightly wound to parallel Quapoor’s personal journey. The materials used (twine, clay and timber) are typically associated with masculine-coded farming activities, which Quapoor participated in in his youth, despite “never being a farming bloke”. Now, through his creative practice, he subverts these ideals through explorations of identity, sexuality, and the heteronormative expectations placed on him as a child, combining the masculine material with the feminine practice as a form of self-reflection.
tightly wound is an intimate, introspective exhibition, a comment on subverting expectations, a memorialisation to the artist’s father, and the culmination of Quapoor’s self-examination. The twine that ties each piece together is one of memory; viewers are captured by Quapoor’s dedication to both his father and his childhood self within each work. He looks forward to further exploring the use of coiled bailing twine, with plans to develop larger ceramic forms which incorporate elements of the twine in different ways. Quapoor is currently working on his next series of works, desolate vessels, to be displayed at Rockhampton Museum of Art, which will feature textile works (in vessel forms), building on those displayed in tightly wound. He also plans to experiment in illustrative animation work alongside stretched paper and more three-dimensional forms for future works. As Quapoor continues to explore further in his interdisciplinary practice, viewers can expect innovative experiments in both concept and construction.
Forthcoming (2025):
– desolate vessels – solo exhibition, Rockhampton Museum of Art (RMOA), August 2025 – January 2026
Chloe Lethbridge Salt is a freelance writer and artist based in Meanjin/Brisbane. Across her practice, she explores themes of everyday rituals, family dynamics, and belonging.
