Exhibited in 3D Poolside, Warringah Aquatic Centre, curated by Bronwen Dugan. Drifting dreamily in trees by the poolside The Unfurling explores ideas about the importance of sanctuary for us all, having the opportunity to escape from our everyday struggles. We are all subject to forces beyond our control but a taking a breath of air, connecting with precious natural environments can nourish and transform us so we are ready to face the world once again with renewed hope and resilience.
The Seed Stitch Collective are playing with the theme ‘Dopamine’ for this year’s Sydney Craft Week. Best known as the driving force behind the feelings of anticipation, euphoria, motivation, and desire, this potent chemical has a complicated flip-side. Through the contemporary use of textile mediums, Soraya Abidin, Suzanne Davey, Niki McDonald, Christina Newberry, Emma Peters and Kylie Walsh each bring their personal take on the Dopamine theme to generate a space radiating with energy and colour in a group show at GAFFA Gallery.
Look here! Now over there! Me, me, me! What, is that me? I am so in loooove! Our everyday digital world is awash with images passing before our eyes; they wow us, entertain, mesmerise, move, shock and distress us but we can’t stop looking. The puff and ruffle of our constructed social media identities razzles and dazzles us. The shiny, the new, the now, all captures our fleeting attention. That dopamine rush. Technology systems enter our virtual spaces, forever expanding and developing new ways to hook us to their particular message. Pfffft… asks what are we truly seeing? What are we really experiencing? Who are we connecting with? What does visibility mean in a media saturated world?
The Saga explores the dynamics and complexities of relationships from a feminine perspective using domestic textiles. The work responds to romantic struggles and failed relationship tales, accounts of sexual transgressions against women, both personal and collective. The sheet, with its physical proximity to skin and bodily experiences is utlised as an emotionally charged site where love and personal drama is experienced, in sickness and in health. Memories and histories, both good and bad, are embodied in the fabric stains, marks, surface rumples and gathers created by bodies tossing, turning, resting. The Saga employs romantic gesture; a floral bouquet and scattered petals, to mark the fabric through the application of heat. It uses the language of romantic opulence; ruffles, frills and gathers of gendered clothing, to question power and control in relationships and its role in creating feminine histories.
A site responsive installation exhibited at the historic Coal Loader, Waverton, as part of the North Sydney Art Prize, curated by Alison Clark. The work was located on the Coal Loader Platform, surrounded by community garden beds. It extends and builds upon The Garden of Cruel Delights photographic series exploring our inter-relationships with plants.
Statement:
The Coal Loader is an exchange zone between us, plants and environmental forces, where flora experience constant transformation through our destructive and constructive actions. Tactile and material interventions performed on living plants are utilised to examine concepts such as empathy, control, adaptation to showcase the power of plants to lead us to better futures.
Rise and Fall is a textile work created in response to recent political storms and to the rise of the right internationally. It wafts and wanes in the slightest breeze. Exhibited in Four Elements: Water, Creative Space.
Statement:
Gathering Shadows is a site responsive installation that responds to the changing cultural history of the Coal Loader, Waverton, from its indigenous heritage, land use on the site, its role in facilitating the coal mining industry through to its current role as a centre for sustainability on the harbour foreshore. The work considers our inter-dependence with site histories (indigenous, animal, geological) and the potential future consequences of our collective actions and inaction towards environmental ecologies. Notions of temporal flows, site ruptures and dis-ruptures, surface wounds and healing are investigated. The work explores clay as a media shaped by human touch and the ceramic traditions of containment. Unable to hold back their contents shells, small animal bones, charcoal and bricks flow and spill in the shadows of the ceramic forms.
Collecting Mountains is a multidisciplinary installation created for EARTH: Four Elements exhibition at The Creative Space. The project included sound, photography, ceramics, plants, books relating to mountains, topographical maps of mountainous areas, domestic furniture, bricks and volcanic rocks. The sound element was a soothing Mountain Meditation repeated continuously. It was created by Wendy Wood, University of Derby, presented as part of a nursing workshop on compassion focussed therapy.
Collecting Mountains reflects upon our complex and contradictory interrelationship with geology and our passive observations of the altered ecologies of the earths surface as we go about our day to day lives. The work investigates mountains as a cultural construct upon which we project our desires for conquest, escape from the everyday, for spiritual fulfilment, our thirst for exploration and aspirational dreams. They fulfil key physical and psychological human needs yet we transform them irrevocably via land acquisition, large scale landscaping, mining and architectural interventions.
The installation explores clay as an earth resource transformed by human action and draws upon ceramic decorative traditions of display in a domestic context, as passive background to our everyday experiences.
Collecting Mountains asks how we might re-imagine our future relationship with the earths surface and considers how we may evolve into a sustaining species through reflection and thoughtful action.
Exhale featured in the SEED STITCH Contemporary Textile award, curated by Soraya Abidin.
Exhale aims to investigate moments in-between: between our conscious and unconscious states and the interior and exterior spaces we exist in as we navigate the the whirl of known and unknown factors in our contemporary world.
All That Remains featured in SALTWATER, a group exhibition at Manly Art Gallery curated by Katherine Roberts. The ceramic sculpture and salt installation responds to the ocean as a dystopic landscape. It explores the sea as a place where contemporary human dramas are played out as people seek sanctuary and safe harbour, and as a site of irreversible ecological and geographical loss in a climate changed future. The work is a fragile memorial relic that references our complex cultural, psychological and corporeal connections to the ocean through motifs of human and marine anatomy as well as maritime architecture. Despite human loss and environmental destruction ‘what remains’ is the chance to seek new responses and political solutions to human struggles.
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| Suzane Davey, Christina frank, Lisa Marshall Windsongs public art installation, mixed media 350 x550 x 400cm |
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