Woonona artist Diana Wood Conroy had put in call after call in a bid to track down a giant tapestry she had made in the 1970s.
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You really couldn't miss it, she thought - it was 2.7 by 2.7 metres, and she needed it back for her major solo exhibition at Wollongong Art Gallery.
She and her husband, Paul Sharrad - also a retired UOW academic - were in the process of rounding up dozens of her kaleidoscopic pieces from public and private collections for the retrospective.
But their search for Glory of the Lord - a massive corn-yellow tapestry commissioned by Menzies College at Macquarie University for $2500 in 1973 - was proving fruitless.
The wall hanging had taken pride of place in the building's dining hall for some 30 years before it was removed around 2005 to make way for some mounted electronic devices and placed somewhere unknown to the current administration.
But Sharrad, a Fellow at UOW and self-appointed "chief research officer" of Wood Conroy's tapestry recovery operation, refused to give up.
"He kept ringing up and talked to the current master of Menzies College," she said.
"So the current master found out who had been the maintenance officer when the tapestry had come down and spoke to him.
"And he said, 'Oh, yes, that tapestry, we wrapped it up very tightly and put it in that dark kitchen storeroom'."
Wood Conroy, 80, shed tears when she held the 51-year-old tapestry in her hands once more, then got to work restoring the borrowed beauty to its former glory ahead of her exhibition, Diana Wood Conroy: An Archaeology of Woven Tapestry.
It's one of 80 textiles, paintings and drawings on display in her Wollongong retrospective, which opened on Saturday and covers 60 years of rich artistic output, from her time working in the British Museum and creating large-scale commissioned works for Australian buildings to running a rug business in Bellingen and decades as Professor of Visual Arts at UOW.
Life's rich tapestry
The title of the exhibition is a nod to Wood Conroy's archaeological career, the training for which got underway at the University of Sydney in the mid-1960s.
In the absence of art history, Classical Archeology proved an intriguing alternative and ultimately taught her how to look at the world in a new way, to "scrutinise every little bit of an object - the texture, the shape, the color, and not to take anything for granted".
After graduating with honours, a young Wood Conroy boarded a ship for Europe in search of new opportunities and quickly learned how to draw objects in order to make a living abroad.
As an archaeological illustrator, she worked with excavations across Europe, museums in Italy and finally the British Museum, where she was to make a life-altering discovery.
After finishing her tasks in rapid time one day, she was sent to tidy up a cupboard, where she found a box of small tapestries stuffed (like the similarly forgotten, out-of-favour Glory of the Lord) in the back of a dark storage space.
Wood Conroy had unearthed sixth-century Coptic tapestries, and was entranced by them.
She found an expert in London to teach her the weaving techniques, while working on her own small loom at night in the little bedsitter she shared with her first husband, Joseph.
Wood Conroy began to understand tapestry as a narrative and pattern technique - where you start at the bottom and move upwards "like building a wall, so you're actually making the whole thing as you go up" - and quickly made a name for herself in the art world as she upsized her frame to commanding new dimensions and used her archeological knowledge to tell captivating woven stories.
The couple's return to Australia in 1970 coincided with a resurgence in crafts and a huge demand for big tapestries to install in all the new public buildings springing up during the construction boom.
"So from 1972 to 1988, I was doing major commissions as soon as I got home, which was quite remarkable when one thinks about it," Wood Conroy said.
"I suppose it was wonderful for me because it meant that I was working right from the beginning for money, which is really hard for the arts."
She settled in Bellingen on the Mid North Coast, established a rug company and became a mother-of-two, before a turning point arrived in the form of an artist's residency at the new School of Creative Arts at UOW.
She found the Wollongong campus of the early 1990s to be an irresistible place full of poets, musicians, painters, ceramicists and textile people "all trying to change the world really".
So when the university asked her to undertake a doctorate with them, she made the bold decision to separate from her husband and start a new life in the Illawarra with her boys.
At the university she met her second husband, Paul, and continued creating and building on her distinguished career as she became a mentor and inspiration to thousands of students.
Transgressions against art
In the search for his wife's big tapestries ahead of the retrospective, Sharrad managed to "excavate" one from the University of Sydney, but wasn't so lucky with the two pieces owned by the National Capital Development Commission in Canberra.
"They seem to have been completely lost," Wood Conroy said.
Sadly, they're not the only ones.
The work she made for the State Planning Commission in NSW? Of unknown location.
The giant one she created in the 1970s for St Andrews House, located beside Saint Andrew's Cathedral and facing Town Hall in Sydney Square? Also gone.
"I said, 'no, this is outrageous'," Wood Conroy said.
"We kept writing to them and saying, 'please find it'.
"It had a five-metre brass rod, which must have been really valuable, attached to it to hang from.
"But they say they don't know where it is and they're far too busy to worry about old tapestries. That was what they said.
"Paul has called them and Pilar Helmers - who I taught at university, who's the wife of Gordon Bradbury, our mayor - put on her best professional voice and said, 'this is the lady mayoress of Wollongong, and we are very anxious to find this tapestry of a significant artist in Wollongong.
"They obviously have to look in all the dark kitchen storerooms that they haven't looked in," she said.
"Otherwise it might have gone to the dump, but I find that hard to believe."
Wood Conroy puts the careless treatment of her old textile artworks down to a "ruthless" out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new corporate culture.
"I think what happens in any institution, old people go out, young ones come in without any of the history and a new aesthetic or a different set of priorities," she said.
She believes some of the unwanted artworks get sent to auctioneers, a dead end in their tapestry hunt given the buyer's identity is kept confidential.
But as well as the disappointments, there have been many heartening wins from universities, colleges, museums, private collections and a church in Penhurst.
"We had a lovely discovery in Sydney, in a place called the Revival Life Centre," she said.
"So that's been very pleasing, but it's taken a lot of work to find them."
Diana is hosting a tapestry workshop on June 22 and 23 and holding an artist talk on July 3. The exhibition runs until September 1.
