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).
