Across Australia, countless traditional crafts, trades and cultural practices are quietly disappearing. Their techniques live mainly in memory – passed from hand to hand, often without written records, and often at risk of being lost when a single maker retires. Heritage Hands was created to document, honour and celebrate these artisans while the knowledge still lives.

Through photography, interviews and story-led documentation, Heritage Hands captures the intimate worlds of makers who preserve endangered skills: umbrella makers, natural dyers, bookbinders, spinners, toolmakers, textile artists, luthiers and more. Each artisan represents a lineage of knowledge shaped by culture, place and time.

This project exists to keep those lineages visible.

Heritage Hands is both a photographic exhibition and a print publication. Volume One, to be released alongside the exhibition in February 2026, features eight artisans whose stories reveal the fragility, and the profound beauty, of handcrafted knowledge. Volume Two, planned for late 2026, expands this work across Australia, documenting up to 24 artisans from diverse cultural backgrounds and traditions.

At its core, Heritage Hands is an act of preservation. It acknowledges that while tools and techniques matter, the true carriers of culture are the people themselves, their lived experience, their patience, their failures and triumphs, their relationship to place, and the ways they use their hands to shape the world around them.

Heritage Hands is created by Melissa Hoedel, a photographer, writer and cultural producer based in Brisbane. Blending documentary photography with deep listening and careful storytelling, she approaches each artisan with respect, curiosity and a commitment to celebrating their craft with integrity.

This project invites audiences to slow down, to look closely, and to consider what it means to inherit, and to lose, the knowledge of making.