Pearl Red Moon
Mixed media and textile artist making wearable art from salvaged fabric.
Pearl Red Moon is a mixed-media and textile artist based in Murrurundi, working across stencil printing, hand embroidery, fabric manipulation and quilting.
Born in Whangarei, New Zealand, she trained as a fashion-industry pattern maker before emigrating to Australia in 1986.
Her own style blends "hippie, bohemian, tribal/oriental/eastern, alternative arty with a bit of goth" - artistic styling built for individual, curvy, creative bodies rather than commercial fashion conventions.
Working in patchwork, hand and machine stitching, drawing, stencilling and paint and ink, she builds her pieces up in layers, working spontaneously and with "no rules," on garments that can take many hours or weeks to complete.
She runs "Boho Banjo art to wear," creating loose, comfortable, individually expressive clothing, much of it from upcycled and salvaged materials.
Her solo exhibition "Women Being," shown at Timeless Textiles Gallery in Newcastle, brought together her art-to-wear garments and 3D fabric sculptures - all one-off pieces designed and stitched in her rural NSW studio.
Her exhibition "Garb Age," shown at the Old Tattersalls Hotel in Murrurundi in 2023, featured fabrics and fibres rescued from the waste stream - mostly used clothes, homewares and unused remnants donated to thrift shops.
In December 2024 she showed "Women Are Women (not men)," a series of paintings celebrating the female figure, also at the Old Tattersalls Hotel - an exhibition she dedicated to Australian equality campaigner Sall Grover, committing 20% of sales toward her legal costs.
In 2023 she was selected as one of 40 finalists in the Australian Wearable Art Festival on the Gold Coast, with an entry titled "Wedding Gown for a Woman to Marry Her Garden," built on a custom rigid frame rather than conventional cloth construction.
In April 2026 she won Best Use of Colour at the Australasian Quilt Convention in Melbourne - marking the event’s 20th anniversary and drawn from over 1,000 national submissions - for her piece "Living Luminously in the Garden of Black Flowers," which was also a finalist alongside a second submitted work.
She shares her skills locally too, having given sustainability and upcycling talks at Murrurundi Library, and over 20 years has taught classes by invitation across Australia and internationally, including in New Zealand, Canada and the USA.
See more of her work and writing on her website.