EXHIBITION DATES: 13 February – 11 April
OFFICIAL OPENING: Friday 13 Febraury, 6pm
COST: Free

Exhibiting Artists

• Bridget Baskerville
• Gemma Brown
• Clementine McIntosh
• Sarah Murray
• Alexander Sarsfield

Details

The group of artists in the Traces exhibition, Alexander Sarsfield, Bridget Baskerville, Clementine McIntosh, Gemma Brown and Sarah Murray, are working on or have a connection to Ngunnawal and Ngambri land. The artists work with a diverse range of media, from ceramics, textiles, printmaking, drawing, weaving and community-based practices. The artists share material and process-based practices, exploring a connection to place and people.

Ceramicist Gemma Brown utilises experimental processes that exploit material properties of industrial waste and commercial ceramic materials. Brown explores human relationships with the environment during a time of rapid environmental change. 

In Bridget Baskerville’s work, the process is integral to the material affect of work.  The core of her current practice is the process of submerging metal plates in bodies of water impacted by human intervention and leaving them to corrode.  This method serves to emphasise the agency of water, as evidenced by the texture and marks of corrosion that develop on the plate’s surface.

Textile and installation artist Clemintine Belle McIntosh utilises site-responsive techniques to connect to place and people. McIntosh buries textiles, to create gestural marks, uses local vegetation as plant dyes and collaborates with local communities by using found and donated materials. The process and installation of the work inherently connecting it to the place in which it was made and superseding the idea of art as ‘object’.

 Artist Alexander Sarsfield explores a connected community practice of sharing of his Māori culture through communal raranga (weaving) practices, creating fibre woven objects with members of the community exchanging weaving skill and conversations. Sarsfield opens himself to vulnerable conversation, aiming to use this community practice to create connection and share cultural identity.

Artist Sarah Murray creates large-scale gestural paintings both en-plein-air and in the studio. Murray explores the embodied experience of landscape, seeking to describe a physical connection to space and place. Murray challenges the colonial ideals of landscape painting by using techniques such as multiple-perspectives, indexing natural objects and sites and gestural mark-marking that explore connectivity to the land and body rather than something that is separate from self.

About the Artists

Bridget Baskervilleis an early career artist, based between Canberra and her hometown of Kandos, NSW (Dabee Wiradjuri Country). Through the themes of community, history, time and ecology, Bridget’s work examines socio-environmental issues faced in regional Australia, looking at human impact on place and the relationship between extractive industries and water. Baskerville works across various media, including printmaking, installation, photography, and video. At the core of her current practice is the process of submerging metal plates in bodies of water impacted by human intervention and leaving them to corrode. This method serves as a means to emphasise the agency of water and non-human entities within these controlled systems, as evidenced by the texture and marks of corrosion that develop on the plate’s surface. Her practice is informed by her experience of growing up in a mining family in regional Australia.

Gemma Brown is an artist working primarily in ceramics on unceded Ngunnawal/Ngambri land. Through a practice based in curiosity and play, her experimental processes exploit material properties of industrial waste and commercial ceramic materials. Gemma responds to what she sees in the environments around her, with an emphasis on exploring human relationships with the environment during a time of rapid environmental change. She has completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at the Australian National University and previously completed a Certificate IV in Visual Arts (ceramics) at TasTAFE in 2018. 

Clementine Belle McIntosh is an emerging rural artist from Gilgandra NSW, the waterhole meeting place of the Wiradjuri, Wailwan and Kamilaroi peoples. Through collaborative methods in circular systems, McIntosh produces predominantly textile-based, site-responsive installations representing her learnt sense of place. Her process-based practice focuses on the act of mark-making to record local dialogues, exchanges and relationships connecting herself with others (strangers and/or the nonhuman). After art display, McIntosh’s works are returned to local nonlinear systems as they are composted in the garden, gifted to a neighbour or repurposed into usable objects.  Underpinning this methodology is a departure from the mainstream art market and its problematic hierarchies of care ie. the tendency to preserve cultural artefacts produced from a place but not preserving the place itself. 

Sarah Murray is an emerging artist based in Canberra, Ngunnawal and Nambri country, working primarily in drawing and painting. Her work explores a bodily experience of landscape, engaging the body within the time, space and place of the land. Murray’s pulsating and immersive works utilise the process of indexing, shifting grounds and changing perspectives to create an embodied impression of space, time and place. Her work explores the material quality of painting and drawing and her use of gesture and mark-making act to both describe form and to create an index of the physical act of painting and drawing.  Her work critiques the patriarchal and colonial paradigms in traditional landscape painting which seek to assert power over landscape and distance the body from the space of the land, rather, she conveys a symbiotic connection between the body and the place of landscape.

Alexander Sarsfield is a Māori artist of Ngāi te Rangi and Ngāti Hako descent who lives and works in Canberra (Ngunawal Ngambri Country). Dabbling across various crafts, he has a particular love for ceramic and textile sculpture. He uses the techniques of raranga (weaving) and enjoys a community and research-based creative practice. His work ponders the subtleties of everyday interaction that inform identity.