By Michael Zewdie

Through weaving, water and the meeting of cultures, Corina Sumner’s artwork invites the Uniting Church to consider how we belong to one another while honouring the stories each of us carries.

For Corina Sumner, the artwork created for the Held Together conference in 2027 begins with the stories, wisdom and ways of knowing carried by Ngarrindjeri and Pacific Island cultures. Through the shared practice of weaving, these traditions come into conversation, offering an image of community in which each strand has something to contribute.

As the Uniting Church prepares to gather for Held Together, Corina’s explanation invites us to pause and listen. What might we learn about being the Church when we take time to hear the stories woven into the artwork?

Across generations, weaving has brought strands together to create something stronger than a single strand alone. In Corina’s artwork, the patterns draw on Ngarrindjeri and Pacific Island weaving traditions, speaking of identity, resilience and kinship.

“Our differences are not barriers to overcome but gifts to be shared,” Corina explains.

Each strand keeps its own character as it becomes part of the whole. It is an understanding of belonging that asks us to recognise the gifts already present in one another and to make room for them in our shared life.

The circles within the artwork represent communities gathered in welcome, conversation, worship and relationship. For Corina, these places of gathering carry a responsibility: to listen deeply, honour one another and walk together.

These are practices the Church is called to keep learning. They take shape in whose stories we hear, whose leadership we honour and how we respond to what is shared with us.

Water also moves through the story of the artwork. Its flowing blues and greens speak of connections between Country and ocean, ancestors and future generations. Corina describes water as a bearer of life, memory and story, reminding us of the Creator’s continuing presence among the peoples of these lands and seas.

“Like the meeting of fresh water and salt water, this artwork reminds us that we do not lose ourselves when we come together,” she says.

The artwork was commissioned on Ngarrindjeri Country beside the Moorundi River, where President Rev Charissa Suli gathered with leaders of the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress and Corina’s family. The President presented Corina with a Tongan woven mat, or fala, connecting the occasion with her presidential theme, Threads of Love. 

In her reflection on the commissioning, the President connected the artwork with the Church’s responsibility to honour First Peoples’ leadership and live its Covenant with Congress. That invitation gives the artwork a place in the Church’s continuing work of relationship, extending beyond the conference itself.

Held Together will begin the Uniting Church’s fiftieth anniversary year and is co-hosted with Congress. The conference draws on Colossians 1:17 and the promise that all things hold together in Christ. 

Corina’s artwork gives expression to that hope through the particular stories and identities of the people who make up our shared life.

“No single strand tells the whole story,” she says.

As First Peoples, Pacific Peoples and all peoples gather, the artwork invites us to bring our stories with care, ready both to share and to receive. For the Uniting Church, it offers a question to carry into Held Together and into our communities: how will we care for the relationships entrusted to us?

We can begin by listening.

Read the President’s reflection: Held Together begins with listening.

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