Exhibition Archive

Clark’s works are positioned in the corners of the gallery space, addressing the metaphorical and physical spaces, like the dusty corners of a room once inhabited, that appeared when her daughter moved away from the home. Making works to inhabit the corner spaces allows Clark to process the transition departure brings, reacting, whilst also trying to make comfort. Clark works through this trauma utilising a variety of materiality, including images that her daughter sent her documenting the last family holiday. These images have been fragmented, rearranged, and added to, and are placed between sheets of perspex, with light penetrating the liminal space in-between. Clark’s practice at large deals with semi-translucency, exploring space, time, and experience.

Coleman explores transitional spaces by reframing the nursery utilising ethical taxidermy animals. Four taxidermy pigeons form a spinning mobile with a music box embedded, creating a kinetic work that plays children’s nursery rhymes. The use of taxidermy deals with life and death and moving to an afterlife. The lorikeet exhibited presents felted remains in the absence of the feathers. The interchange between felting and the remains explores concepts of mourning, loss and nurturing. Additionally, Kitty addresses moral complexities and children’s stories, which often portray cats as wicked. Coleman draws on such culturally embedded stories and reframes them visually, with an emphasis on nuanced emotion. Creature Curiosities recreates Coleman’s childhood memories of collecting and cherishing animal remains. This series examines how the act of collecting and transforming remains into art relics can provoke curiosity and reposition the way animals are viewed, both in the physical and metaphorical context.

The works in this exhibition are by Alumni of the School of Creative Art at the University of Southern Queensland, both of whom have completed doctorates with the University. The transitional themes in Rise reference shifting phases, times, and experiences, resulting in the development of knowledge and a rise in consciousness.

Curated by Dr Alexandra Lawson & Dr Rhi Johnson