PLACES AND SPACES
S.A.ADAIR
EASTON DUNNE
KATIE HAYNE
REBECCA MAYO
AUNTY DEIDRE MARTIN
JACOB MORRIS
ELLIAT RICH
JAMES YOUNG
CURATED BY DAN TOUA
Left KATIE HAYNE
Judy Cassab Street, 2024 Oil on board, 36 x 26cm
Right KATIE HAYNE
Judy Cassab Street in Progress, 2024, Digital video (9:37mins), dimensions variable
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Places and Spaces brings together artists who explore the environments around them through installation, sculpture, painting and augmented reality. Featuring local and interstate artists, the exhibition unfolds as a dynamic dialogue between the tangible and intangible spaces we inhabit: our homes, our online realities, as well as the metaphorical spaces we occupy. The artists bring a diverse range of works to this exhibition by utilising natural materials of surrounding environments; looking back on hometown experiences through a Queer lens; questioning access to and use of certain places via technology; and documenting a city’s rapid changes over time.
Kamberri / Canberra artist S.A.Adair is a multi-disciplinary artist who works predominantly with installation and spatial engagement. Her practice explores the physical, emotional and psychological effect of the human experience and the conflict between urban and natural systems. By using specific locations to initiate a dialogue between the work and the space it inhabits, Adair creates responsive and immersive installations that reflect, amplify and interact with the existing environment.
For this exhibition, Adair has created the earth is listening (2024), a large installation work that takes over the front space of the gallery. Carefully placed in a line-like formation on the floor are five groups of blackened branches, leading the viewer into the gallery and towards the main wall. Dominating this wall is a large circular structure made up of more black branches, twisted and entwined with one another to form an imposing organic circle contrasting against the stark white wall on which it is hung. With branches reaching out from its periphery this work seems to be calling out to the audience, and entices the viewer to come closer, and when viewed from the right spot, the floor beneath the work reveals a muddy reflection, creating a portal-like environment. Suggestive of the void this work speaks of the unknown and potential possibilities, it provides a space to ruminate and reflect. A nod to German artist and art theorist Joseph Beuys and his teachings on social sculpture reshaping society and politics, Adair uses this work to question: what is the function of art and how can it inform the environments we inhabit?
Sharing the front space is a new suite of works by local painter Katie Hayne. For the past 22 years Hayne has lived and worked on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, and her practice seeks to capture the dynamic nature of Kamberri / Canberra. Since 2017, Hayne has been documenting the changing urban fabric of the nation’s capital through observational painting, video and installation. She proposes that realist painting continues to be relevant in contemporary art and that the slow process of painting can contribute to an understanding of our subjectivity and impact on the planet.
For this exhibition, Hayne presents Whitlam-in-Progress (2024), a series of eight small and medium sized oil paintings on board, with an accompanying video of the artist painting a construction site en plein air. With these works Hayne ponders what histories are embedded in the fabric of place and questions the impact of urban changes. She argues that there is a fine line between the destruction and creation of place, as the landscape is remade into something else, and recognises her own complicity in this process.
Image EASTON DUNNE
Meat Market (detail), 2023 Ink and watercolour on paper, 931 x 128cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Using video to document herself painting, Hayne attempts to openly situate herself within this framework – of new construction, of ‘art washing’, of re-making nature into suburbia – and encourages the viewer to consider the perspective of the artist and their role in the communication of place.
Easton Dunne is an artist, arts worker and arts educator based in Central Queensland on Darumbal Country. Their practice explores queer identity work and experiences in rural and regional contexts through an autobiographical lens. Dunne’s work Meat Market (2023) looks back on their hometown experiences growing up Queer, trans and non-binary in rural Central Queensland.
Meat Market has a commanding presence, spanning the length of a long wall in the back gallery. It consists of 90 A3 panels of punchy watercolours and bold text-based collage, and, though accessible to a diverse audience, Dunne has skilfully injected a sublayer of queerness as an inside joke for the LGBTQIP+ community. The imagery Dunne has used are symbols of Rockhampton - the town they grew up in – relaying Dunne’s experience of that place, while the text is taken directly from their father’s cattle and shooting magazines. Combined, they humorously upend the ‘macho’, cis-normative iconography that Rockhampton – and many other regional Australian towns - use to advertise masculine symbols of the Australian working industry.
Dunne grew up as one of five children in a loving and accepting Catholic household, on a remote cattle station, next door to his fathers’ fathers’ cattle station, and then went to Catholic boarding school; with this work they wanted to create an artwork that they didn’t have the chance to experience in their childhood.
The large drapery installation in the back gallery is a collaboration between Rebecca Mayo, Aunty Deidre Martin and Jacob Morris, created as part of the Tellus Art Project 2022 at Bundanon. The works comprise long stretches of fabric in muted natural colours, hung from the ceiling with soft strands of hemp rope and long wooden dowels that allow the linen to drape and cascade gently to meet the gallery floor.
Rebecca Mayo is an Australian artist who works between Kamberri / Canberra and Naarm / Melbourne. Her practice principally examines relations and interactions between urban ecologically significant sites and people. Mayo’s hand-cranked Plant Sensibilia Machine has been used for this project: the linen lengths have been pulled through a heated dye bath where the colours from local native plants are used to print poems by Aunty Deidre Martin and Jacob Morris.
Aunty Deidre Martin is a Walbanga woman of the Yuin Nation, and her poem (written with poet and novelist Lisa Gorton) explores interconnected life cycles of place. She speaks of the relationship between the
Image ELLIAT RICH and JAMES YOUNG
Strata Stratum Stratus 2019, Central Australian sandstone, photograph, AR portal/device(s), marker, dimensions variable
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Acacia Longifolia leaf and the seasons, and how - being part of a weather network - the plant reports quietly to those who hold knowledge, or who stop to observe and care.
Morris is a Gumea-Dharrawal Ngundah man of the Yuin Murring, and his poem Arawara and Cararura is about the stories that weave through place and form the bedrock of Country. Using the dye of the Native Cherry plant, it is a story about a man, Arawara, determined to protect Country and the majestic Cararura (Red Cedar) which used to grow abundantly up and down the South Coast.
Sitting quietly in a corner of the back gallery is another collaborative work, by Kamberri / Canberra-based artists and designers Elliat Rich and James Young, titled Strata Stratum Stratus. The work features a chair carved from sandstone. The physical chair remains in the quarry in Mparntwe / Alice Springs where the sandstone was sourced and the chair was created, but it can only be experienced via augmented reality in the gallery. Using the provided tablet, the viewer is invited to ‘scan’ the marker on the floor plinth, revealing the red stone chair. The work questions the energy and material costs of supply chains across Australia, but also examines the cultural costs – who has access, and or, rights, to this land and its resources? By remaining in-situ, to be bought but never truly possessed; this work examines value systems, returning agency to place and our presence in the landscape.
Ultimately Places and Spaces is an exhibition through which artists S.A.Adair, Easton Dunne, Katie Hayne, Rebecca Mayo with Aunty Deidre Martin and Jacob Morris, and Elliat Rich and James Young, provide poignant observations of the places and spaces around them, and consequently, complex studies on their own histories and lived experiences.
Dan Toua
Associate Curator, Gallery Manager
Canberra Contemporary Art Space
Left to Right REBECCA MAYO and AUNTY DEIDRE MARTIN
Acacia longifolia, 2022-23, Rope, wooden dowel, linen, hemp, mordant printed and dyed with Acacia longifolia, dimensions variable Poem written by Deidre Martin with Lisa Gorton, 2021-2023
REBECCA MAYO and JACOB MORRIS
Arawarra and Cararura, 2022-23, Pope, wooden dowel, linen, mordant printed and dyed with Native Cherry (Exocarpos cupressiformis), 140 x 1300cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Image S.A.ADAIR the earth is listening, 2024
Charred wood, wood stain, ink, paper, dimensions variable
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Left KATIE HAYNE
Kathleen Shillam Chase, 2024
Oil on board, 46 x 61cm
Centre KATIE HAYNE
Peter Sculthorpe Avenue, 2024
Oil on board, 46 x 61cm
Right KATIE HAYNE
Olive Cotton View, 2024
Oil on board, 30 x 30cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Image EASTON DUNNE Meat Market, 2023 Ink and watercolour on paper, 931 x 128cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Left to Right KATIE HAYNE
Norma Tullo Street, 2024 Oil on board, 40 x 22cm
KATIE HAYNE
Nita Veronica Pannell Street, 2024 Oil on board, 40 x 22cm
KATIE HAYNE
Judy Cassab Street, 2024 Oil on board, 36 x 26cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Judy Cassab Street in Progress, 2024
Digital video (9:37mins), dimensions variable
KATIE HAYNE
Dr Thancoupie Gloria Fletcher James Crescent, 2024 Oil on board, 51 x 41cm
KATIE HAYNE
Jean Baptiste Apuatimi Crescent, 2024 Oil on board, 51 x 41cm
Left to Right KATIE HAYNE
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
