Michele Grimston, Shan Crosbie, Ann McMahon and Heidi Smith, details from Soft Edges, 2024. Image courtesy of the artists.
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Michele Grimston, Shan Crosbie, Ann McMahon & Heidi Smith
Gallery 1A
Friday 21 February - Sunday 16 March
Opening Thursday 20 February 2025, 6pm - 8pm
Soft Edges is an exhibition by four artist friends. They share an interest in environmental and creative sustainability. They all work in community development and for Soft Edges, they have created a community of four, exploring the overlap of their love of material experimentation, combining their focus to create a series of sculptures, textiles, drawings and installation.
Shared meals. Chilly night time walks. Windy farm walks.
Ping ping goes the chatty digital platform, given soft edges.
The decision was made to link their works in practical ways through sharing materials. The fabric pool was snipped and ripped so colour and texture would move between works, blurring and softening. The farm provided rusty objects, grasses, twine, wire, tools, muds and soil for making pigments. These materials are collaborators and are introduced to bright fabrics, grandparent’s bedsheets, wire from notebooks spines, twigs and suspension apparatus.
The four sets of hands gently instruct and smooth out the disparate items forming objects that explore the larger themes of care for animals, our environments and each other. Softness is not necessarily frail or weak. Generations of animals scratch themselves on a particularly lovely tree, making Soft Edges. Animal track through the grasses creating a soft edged pathway. Woven, wrapped, and cobbled ephemera condenses into sturdy carry all’s of concept. A single stitch is flimsy but many, many stitches make the object useful, beautiful or both.
Soft Edges is a body of work that tenderly invokes the memories of the artists through a shared and thoughtful process of community care. Our communities are beyond people. The works in this exhibition borrow, for a time, materials but the talking, walking, making moments, soften the edges of seemingly impossible ideas of conservation and sustainability.
