Savanhdary Vongpoothorn

Her residencies in various countries influenced her experimental approach to art. In Vietnam she learned to weave with Bamboo. She came back from India with a series of delicate works on paper that echo the colours of traditional subcontinental painting. In Japan she pursued a project with poet Noriko Tanaka. She created a 2019 work (Footsteps to the Nigatsu-do) that consists of rubbings made from the sacred patterns found on the steps of the Nigatsu-do temple at Nara, embellished with Tanaka’s calligraphy and her own loose characters.

She is also said to have works in the collections of the Campbelltown Arts Centre, the Wollongong University art collection, the University of Western Sydney art collection, and the Cruthers collection in the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery (but is not listed in the Cruthers 2018 list of artworks and artists).

She is married to anthropologist Ashley Carruthers and has two children. In 2004 she moved to Canberra, Australia. Today she and her family spend time in Vietnam every year in the town of Hoi An and Savanhdary acknowledges the influence of Vietnam in her art.

At school she only excelled in English and Art. She was accepted at the Nepean College of the Arts, University of Western Sydney based on her portfolio, not her HSC results. At Nepean she was encouraged to "play" and to view her cultural heritage in new ways. She began to focus on her textile heritage. She was first noticed for her student work shown in the NSW Travelling Art Scholarship exhibition in 1992.

She graduated with a visual arts degree from the University of Western Sydney in 1992, and then earned a masters in visual arts from the College of Fine Art (part of the University Of New South Wales) in 1993.

In the years after art school, her work integrated elements from Australian landscape and symbols from Laotian textiles. Her early works (1992 - 1994) were three-dimensional floor works. But by the mid-1990s, Vongpoothorn was creating textured works on paper and canvas.

Savanhdary Vongpoothorn (born 1971) is a Laotian-born Australian visual artist. She immigrated with her parents as a seven-year old, and through studies and travel has integrated Laotian, Vietnamese and Australian influences in her art. Her art reflects cross-cultural influences in contemporary Australia as she fuses her personal experiences, dual cultures, and painterly abstraction. She has exhibited widely in Australia and Singapore, and her works are held in major state and regional galleries across Australia. She was a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize 2016 and the Moet & Chandon art prize in 1998. She lives and works in Canberra.

Savanhdary Vongpoothorn was born in Champasak, Laos, in 1971 and came to Australia as a seven year-old in 1978. In 1970 her anti-communist father was about to be sent to a re-education camp and escaped to Thailand. Her mother then took the children and crossed the Mekong River into Thailand with a people smuggler. After nine months in a Thai refugee camp, an Australian aunt sponsored them to emigrate to Australia. Her work today evokes her Buddhist background.