Creatives selected for inaugural Caroline Simpson Library Creative Residency
Museums of History NSW is excited to welcome Jane Burton Taylor and Vita Cochran as the first creatives to be selected for the Caroline Simpson Library Creative Residency program, commencing in February 2026.
During their residency, the artists will be given dedicated time, space and special access to the Caroline Simpson Library Collection – a unique resource that holds a vast array of objects and stories related to the history of houses, interiors, gardens and domestic life. The aim of the residency is to inspire the creation of new work, collaboration and creative exchange.
2026 Creatives
Jane Burton Taylor
Creative practice: Visual art
Objects chosen for museums are there for all sorts of reasons. They often reinforce our national stories, but not always. In a sense they have their own suggestive narrative. Artists are not historians; they construct a different kind of connection between the past and the future. For me, the residency invites reinterpretation of historical objects in relation to the contemporary. I am grateful for the opportunity to spend slow time engaged with the collection, and the experts who curate and care for it.
Jane Burton Taylor is a Sydney-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice incorporates textile art, digital media, sculpture and immersive installation. Jane has an ongoing interest in place and how we perceive it, personally, collectively, and in terms of its historical, cultural and ecological context. Jane’s concern for social justice often leads her to make works that she hopes will support reparation. Her practice involves research of historical collections, and in particular the study of documents and objects chosen for their potential to elaborate on contemporary issues.
Vita Cochran
Creative practice: Textiles
The Caroline Simpson Library is a joyous resource for makers. Every time I visit I find new things to stimulate hand, eye and imagination – from dazzlingly sophisticated century-old wallpaper patterns to fabrics and rug designs that demonstrate the ceaseless human desire to enrich, embellish and decorate. It’s a place that values material knowledge that can only be passed from hand to hand through time. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to consult this amazing archive in person, in depth, and spin some of my own work from it, all within the studio space of the historic Mint.
Vita Cochran is an artist working in textiles. Her speculative embroideries, quilts, rugs and functional objects have been widely collected and exhibited in Aotearoa / New Zealand and Australia. She has a deep interest in the patterns and objects that populate domestic interiors, and their social, emotional and artistic histories. Recent work has included a series of hand-hooked rag rugs called After Paintings, which were made after rugs seen in paintings of modernist interiors by, for example, Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse; and a series of Rorschach-like textile banners, called Exploded Coats, which revealed the delirious array of shapes contained within unpicked second-hand garments.
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Stories from the Caroline Simpson Library
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Fatshaudi commissioned works
We commissioned a range of musicians to create new compositions for Dream Feast in response to sheet music held in the Caroline Simpson Library Collection. One of the musicians, Fatshaudi (Brisbane-based producer Rachael Ryan), shares her experience
On a tour with palms: a botanical foray into the Caroline Simpson Library
A search for palms in the museum collections took this researcher on a journey back to a time when these plants were considered an essential addition to the tasteful home
![Walford, 7 Knox Street, Double Bay, December 1967 [photographer unknown]](https://api.mhnsw.au/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.mhnsw.au%2Ffotoweb%2Fembed%2F2026%2F05%2Fb973a68e392143138186b649ed3cb6b5.jpg&w=1920&h=400&fit=inside&format=webp)
Leslie Walford Archive
For nearly 50 years Leslie Walford AM (1927–2012) was one of Sydney’s most successful interior designers, the decorator of choice for the city’s social elite and a leading figure in the Society of Interior Designers of Australia (SIDA).
The mysterious O.S.B.
One item in the Caroline Simpson Library Collection has been capturing our attention recently: a beautifully illustrated catalogue of electric light fittings, identified only by a mysterious insignia on the cover – the initials ‘O.S.B.’