Baskets hold, gather and store; their utility is enriched by their ease and fit the human body as they assist in the labour of carrying. Skilled hands are required to craft a basket form, often with make-do, natural materials. In this new work, Phelan has merged techniques from her academic studies in ceramic with her lifetime of textile knowledge gathered whilst yarning and watching her mother’s hands make, in pandemic online workshops and alongside Yolngu and Gunaikurnai women. Cloth and clay are both malleable materials requiring repeated actions and time to generate form. Combining coiled and pinched clay with twined and braided textiles reclaimed from cast-off family clothes, record the hours of making whilst tracing the action of the maker’s hand. Assembled and stand-alone sculptures are characterised by a relationship between materiality and form, bringing together clay and textile with interdependence on the site of making and the affect of being in the world. In The Weight of Waiting, Phelan’s world of waiting depicts her identity as a mother and artist with the ebb and flowing demands of caring. Her making was also influenced by the long shadow cast by Melbourne’s two lockdown periods where the confines of the home became the site of making and a necessary source of material. These intimate assemblages compress care, repetition, tacit knowledge, and time into their generation. The Weight of Waiting continues Phelan’s process-driven practice which investigates the generative and transformative potential of pliable materials and their capacity to suggest meaning beyond themselves – poetic, cultural, social, and as keepers of time.