TO APPROACH THE UNKNOWABLE - A CURATED GROUP EXHIBITION - GRACE COSSINGTON SMITH GALLERY - IN COLLABORATION WITH THE HASSALL COLLECTION - 2025

I’m thrilled to share that I’ll be exhibiting in a curated group exhibition at the Grace Cossington Smith Gallery called ‘To Approach the Unknowable’ opening Sat 1 Nov 2-4pm .

This exhibition brings together four Australian contemporary artists whose works, guided by a surrealist inclination, engage in a fascinating dialogue with personal ideas and with works selected by the artists themselves from the Hassall Collection. The juxtaposition creates a rich exploration of the surrealist inspiration within the Australian context.

The exhibition features works by James Gleeson, Peter Booth, Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester and Louise Hearman - artists whose imaginative force continues to resonate deeply within Australian art.

My works form an installation in response to personally selected pieces from the Geoffrey Hassall Collection by Sidney Nolan, James Gleeson, and Louise Hearman. Among them are Gleeson’s final, unfinished drawing and a Nolan painting composed into my own work, alongside other selected pieces from the collection that converse with recent ceramics and newly created drawings, paintings, and mixed media works.

These works inspired a poem exploring thirst as a metaphor for life cycles, creativity, and water as a vital force. The installation embodies the poem’s rhythm and subterranean thought, unfolding as a theatrical and spiritual dialogue between image and word — tracing how inspiration flows between absence and renewal, presence and transformation.

The exhibition title is taken from a 1976 poem by Australian artist James Gleeson in which he states:

The aim of Art
is to approach the unknowable;
and the only approach
is by way of the known, to use it
as a springboard.

🗓️ Please join us on Saturday 1 November, 2–4pm
for the opening of the exhibition.

✨ To be officially opened by Simon Weir
Artist and Academic Sydney School of Architecture, Design & Planning, The University of Sydney

The artists will be present.

RSVP appreciated

📍 Grace Cossington Smith Gallery
✨ Works generously lent from the Hassall Collection

Image credit: Louisa Chircop ‘Tongue against the Cactus’, mixed media and photomontage on watercolour paper, 76cm x 56cm (paper dimensions).

DOUBLE PAGE REVIEW OF 'GROTTO GIRL' BY DR LOUIS LAGANÀ - THE MALTA INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY - 15 JUNE 2025

Another Double-Page Spread -This time a Review in The Malta Independent on Sunday!

I’m feeling incredibly grateful and a little overwhelmed to share that Grotto Girl at MUŻA Malta’s National Community Museum of Art has been featured in another double-page spread. This time in The Malta Independent on Sunday.

The response to the exhibition has truly touched me. I’ve had people reach out - some with visible emotion - to say how deeply the work resonated with them and how much they’ve loved the exhibition. Knowing that Grotto Girl has stirred something personal in others is the most meaningful recognition I could hope for.

A heartfelt thank you to the wonderful Professor Louis Laganà for his thoughtful, generous and amazing review. Your words captured the spirit of the exhibition so beautifully. And thank you to the lovely Henry Zammit Cordina for the stunning photography.

COMING SOON - A LANDMARK AUSTRALIAN-FIRST CROSS-GENERATIONAL EXHIBITION AT HAZELHURST ARTS CENTRE

I couldn’t be more excited and honoured to be curated in this Australian first-landmark cross-generational survey exhibition. ‘In the Arms of Unconsciousness: Women, Feminism and the Surreal’ curated by Carrie Kibbler (and assisted by Naomi Stewart, assistant curator) will open late June 2023 at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre. The exhibition, showcasing a stellar line up of 22 significant Australian women artists, aims to look at the links between feminism and surrealism in Australian art.

The exhibition is to be officially launched on Friday 30 June 2023 6pm in the main gallery at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre and will continue until Sunday 3rd September 2023. The exhibition will also be complimented with a jam packed program of interviews, artist talks and other promotional events including a special feature film presenting the artists in show and accompanying digital catalogue with essays written by leading Australian arts writers.

Exhibiting Artists: Del Kathryn Barton, Vivienne Binns, Pat Brassington, Louisa Chircop, Madeleine Kelly, Deborah Kelly, Juz Kitson, Lucy O’Doherty, Caroline Rothwell, Kaylene Whiskey, Jelena Telecki, Lynda Draper, Freya Jobbins, Jenny Orchard, Jill Orr, Patricia Piccinini, Julie Rrap, Honey Long and Prue Stent, Marikit Santiago, Anne Wallace and Amanda Williams.

The exhibition will examine the waves of feminism in Australian which began in the 1970s to the early 1980s, and again in the early 1990s and how they were directly linked to the feminist art and Riot Grrrl movement in which female artists and theorists began to rethink and reclaim how the female body was represented. Artists during this period include Vivienne Binns, Jill Orr, Pat Brassington and Anne Wallace.

More recently, a younger generation of female artists are working with elements of the surreal, the psychoanalytic, the unconscious and the fantastical in their practice, with several specifically citing the influence of the surrealists in their practice. Artists include Del Kathryn Barton, Louisa Chircop, Madeline Kelly, Deborah Kelly, Juz Kitson, Lucy O’Doherty, Caroline Rothwell and Amanda Williams.

The exhibition proposes that there has been an intrinsic link between feminism and the surreal, particularly in Australia, and this current wave is most notable since 2012 in that it aligns with the fourth wave of feminism.

More news to come on this amazing exhibition!

Hazelhurst has received funding from Create NSW and Sutherland Shire Council for this project.