15/03/24 - 20/04/24
FIRST SPACE
Still a Blakfulla
Bianca Templar
Still a Blakfulla explores what it means to be an Aboriginal person in modern day Australia and the paradoxes the come with it. You're either treated like an outcast, a stranger that should be shamed into silence; a god that is all knowing, and expected to know all or their god status is put into question or your identity is questioned due to not meeting that persons stereotypical assumption of what an Aboriginal person must look like. All of which are just as harmful and as uneducated as the other.
INNER SPACE
Down By The Water
Kurt Sorenson
At 2am on May 4th, 1897 a Mr R Plummer was riding back from an engagement at Launceston along the western edge of the Tamar River when through the gloom appeared the figure of a woman on the road. Plummer wheeled his horse to stop from running over her. When he had calmed the horse Plummer could see her white dress pulled up over her head. Plummer attempted to communicate with the figure but the woman stood barefooted and motionless. Plummer was so startled by the sight that he did not move closer than 20 yards away. After some time, the woman calmly motioned off the road and into the mist and scrub. Plummer reported the sighting to the local police. When police inspected the site of Plummer’s encounter, they found a tree stump roughly where Plummer had indicated he saw the woman. It was assumed the stump, in the misty darkness, could have been mistaken for a figure near the road. But as their inspections were ending searchers found the bare footprints of a person roughly fitting the woman’s height and weight that led directly into the thick bushland.
Four days earlier police received a report of a missing woman by the name of Corin near Gravelly Beach. Upon conducting a search of the area, police had found a hand kerchief on a local jetty with a single red embroidered letter G and a note saying ‘Farewell, my brain is gone.’ Mrs Corin was never found. It was determined that Mrs Corin had died from a bout of ‘temporary insanity’ brought on by ‘the influence of the valley’.
The mysterious sighting of the ghostly figure in the road was never resolved.
BACK SPACE
Between Time & Space
Tiger & Devil / Kim Vredeveld & Sunshine Wood
Tiger & Devil’s 3rd collaboration is a further exploration of inner and outer journeys, where layered worlds are created, history is illuminated and new landscapes emerge out of the darkness, revealing a place where the light shines through.
Sunshine is exploring created spaces, she is seeking safe dimensions to escape to through the use of multi-disciplinary approaches. This is an expedition from the past, a reconciliation of the present and a hopeful and healing future.
Kim's work is a study in acclimatisation - working with the land/empathetically connecting with unfamiliar Country. Collecting and printing with found objects, Kim meditatively & metaphorically ponders the juxtaposing landscape of past/present lutruwita. Acknowledging historical injustices, ecological issues and abundant beauty.
THE SPACE
How do I bury you if I don't have your body: counted, graded, numbered
Minami Ivory
This series visually communicates my personal journey through the clinical, sterile IVF treatments and the physical and mental pain of this process.
In the lab, embryos are counted, graded and numbered like samples. They’re stored frozen together in the dark and quiet room like icy poles in the corner shop at night. In every embryo transfer, the “baby” was thawed and simply slid down the tube into my uterus. This would be it, they’d say.
Throughout the fertility treatments, I just obsessively continued to swallow my defrosted embryos. The aim of the journey became obscure. Mindlessly and compulsively, I consumed the embryos like bitterly cold icy poles. It became so painful that I just wanted it to be over.