In February 2026, Maritime Museum Tasmania will present a remarkable new exhibition by Tasmanian-born artist Sue Pedley, whose practice draws together memory, materiality and the many ways maritime histories are carried across time and place. Pedley’s exhibition, Prevailing Gales, invites visitors into an atmospheric reimagining of one of the most extraordinary encounters in Tasmania’s seafaring past: the 1830 meeting between Tasmanian convicts aboard the brig Cyprus and samurai from Japan’s Awa Domain. Her work brings this cross-cultural moment into the present, tracing the threads that connect oceans, archives and lived experience.

Central to Pedley’s approach is a deep sensitivity to materials. Using handmade Awagami paper, indigo dye, inks, cyanotypes, rope, plaster and sound, she explores how stories take shape and how they drift, fragment and resurface. These are the same materials once used by samurai illustrators, creating a tactile link to the Japanese manuscripts that recorded the Cyprus encounter. Long forgotten, these documents were rediscovered by researcher Nick Russell, whose work has helped confirm the accuracy of the convicts’ accounts and shed light on the Japanese perspective.

Pedley’s exhibition does not simply retell the narrative. Instead, it meditates on what it means for a Tasmanian ship and its unwilling crew to arrive in a nation closed to the world, and how this encounter rippled across geographies and centuries. Through her installations, Pedley evokes the uncertainty of the mutineers’ journey, the vigilance of the samurai, and the shifting boundaries between fact, memory and imagination.

Prevailing Gales continues Pedley’s long-standing interest in the sensory and emotional dimensions of maritime space, as seen in earlier works exploring coastlines, navigation and displacement. Here, she expands that investigation into a layered story of cultural meeting, resistance and the enduring forces of the sea.

We look forward to sharing this thoughtful and evocative exhibition with visitors from 20 February to 24 May 2026.

Prevailing Gales is funded by Creative Australia.