Balik Kampung, Going Home... (2022) explores Renee’s cultural identity and heritage as a mixed-race woman by reconfiguring and re-contextualising photos from family archives. Embedding and layering these images within textiles that evoke the clothing made and worn by her ancestors around the world, she navigates a complex set of histories and challenge the documentary purpose of photography.

Ethnically, Renee is of Sinhalese, Malayali, English, Shetlander, German and Irish descent. As an Australian Malaysian, the journey of uncovering this hybridity has been a deeply personal investigation of images, objects, and materials. Fabric – embroidered saris, handmade lace, and tartan – has interwoven the sensory and visual of the embodied here and now with fragments of family history. Rather than defining a fixed past or finding something that has been lost, a new set of connections to identity has been made and a future narrative discovered.