EXHIBITION DATES: 5 April – 8 June, 2024

OFFICIAL OPENING: Friday 5 April, 6pm

Make an Origami House: Saturday 13 April, 1:30 – 3:30pm

This exhibition uses sculptural and visual responses to explore what it means to have a roof over our heads and our continuous quest to make a place to habitually return too.

The artists ask: what does abode mean to us? Is it a place of comfort and pleasure, or of fear and isolation? Is it a space of escape and refuge or a sense of belonging? Is it a physical manifestation representing us or is it a purely internal dwelling space within an environment of impermanence and transience?

Where is our refuge, our true abode? Is it where the mind and body settle?

Abode will provide the opportunity for community engagement where the public can contribute their personal ideas about Abode. Visitors are invited to write their thoughts on Abode and places where people live and add them to an installation as part of the exhibition.

About the Artists

Caroline Huf’s art practice is in video, installation, and performance. She is interested in how a continuous sense of self is created through time, weaving in and out of inner thoughts, memory, subconscious, from stillness to agitation, and how that continuous thread of time may be disrupted. For Abode Huf has woven speaker wire and chairs to explore the voices and sounds of home that inhabit our body and memory.

Kati Görgényi is a Hungarian born artist living in Canberra. She majored in sculpture at the ANU in Canberra and her art practice is largely influenced by my professional background as a psychologist and by having grown up in the messy history and politics of Central-Europe and by being a migrant. Görgényi is interested in how things evolve, how people and objects influence each other. Decay, transformation, grief, renewal and memory, intergenerational trauma are subjects of her art. She works with mixed-media materials and sometimes with text. And getting involved in community art is important to her.

Janet Long is a Canberra based multidisciplinary artist whose work encompasses outdoor and public sculpture, ceramics, textiles, using materials intended to convey ideas around the body/mind dis/connection, states of mind and Buddhist notions of impermanence and imperfection. Long’s work has been informed by years of meditation practice that seeks to reveal internal states and the metaphorical by means of combining found industrial materials and objects, cast objects, natural materials and contrasting these with soft sculpture and other media.

Make An Origami House With ABODE

Taking inspiration from the exhibition, experiment in this paper- based construction workshop with the ABODE artists. Discuss with them the exhibition concept as you learn some origami and make your own house to take home.