Isabelle Mackay-Sim, Homebody, 2023. Image courtesy of artist.
Isabelle Mackay-Sim & Gemma Brown
Gallery 1
Friday 18 April - Sunday 11 May
Opening Thursday 17 April, 6pm-8pm
In their shared studio, Gemma Brown and Isabelle Mackay-Sim watch one another’s work accumulate into strange scenes and landscapes. Through processes of experimentation, pondering, and play, both artists generate imagined worlds that invite a relationship with the viewer. The ceramic objects that make up these worlds operate at multiple scales; at once objects for the hand or the home, drawing on ceramic histories of the vessel and the domestic space, and monoliths that describe a constructed landscape, suggesting geology in miniature. For this exhibition, Gemma and Isabelle lean into the idea of world-building, and create abstract sculptural groupings that tread the line between sculpture and diorama.
The body is a central player in the practice of both artists, and becomes another structure in the scene - organic matter alongside the architectural and geological. Isabelle’s work embraces soft, visceral forms and surfaces that suggest skin and flesh to place abstractions of the body within her compositions. These components become a proxy for the viewer, who is invited to project themselves into the constructed scene. Gemma’s work situates the body as an entity that is both a part of, and separate from its surroundings. Her forms reference the natural and built environments, the geological, the industrial, and imagined environmental futures. As the viewer moves through the exhibition space, their own body becomes a part of this world, highlighting the artist's interest in human relationships to place, space, and environment.
