David Helmers, Collapse to Emerge, 2026. Image courtesy of the artist.
Catherine Anselmi, David Helmers, Ro Murray, Mandy Burgess
Gallery 1
Opening Thursday 30 July, 2026, 6-8pm
Friday 31 July - Sunday 26 August
In UNRuly, three artists - Catherine Anselmi, David Helmers and the collaboration from Ro Murray and Mandy Burgess - use the strategy of unruliness as an important generator of form in their object-making practices. Their installations explore unruly themes: the flux of time and matter, transformation, and female determination in old age.
The unruly is the recognition that life is messy and often outside one’s control. It’s the unknown, the strange, the queer - being outside societal norms - which question the perception of difference and hierarchies of being. The transformation of an impulse or idea in art often starts with the strategy of unruly experimentation; these artists lean into unruliness, pushing the boundaries into the new and unexpected, opening new worlds.
Catherine Anselmi’s sculptural work explores processes of becoming and unbecoming, tracing stories of life and its co-evolution with matter. Echoing geological transformations within the Earth’s lithosphere — where rocks and minerals shift, fuse, and reform under slow, unruly forces — her practice treats sculpture as a means of thinking through deep time and material change. Anselmi takes the world’s material phenomena as knots within a vast network of stories and narratives, immersing humanity within the expansive temporality of geologic time.
In his works Collapse to Emerge, David Helmer's experimental collaboration with porcelain, fabric and chance invites emergence: in the kiln his pieces transform in the pyro-plastic state - slumping, tearing or collapsing - into fragile and complex forms. The installation of these suspended translucent porcelain pieces encourages viewers to move between them to experience unguarded playful encounters, to negotiate and remake the constraining rules of engagement: mirroring the process of political change.
In Passion, Murray and Burgess’s collaboratively-made charcoal portraits celebrate the women elders of Australian art, who, despite being largely unacknowledged, continue their practices past the age of 75. In depicting these ‘unruly’ women, Ro Murray and Mandy Burgess work over each other’s drawings, showing the process of the often-futile struggle to unite their different gestures. The resulting sketchiness and imperfections allow the emergence of the women’s’ lively presences through shifting, impermanent lines.
Learn more about the artists:
Catherine Anselmi
Anselmi is an emerging artist from Sydney with a National Art School MFA following achievements in ceramics in New Zealand. Using varied material and digital technologies, her work explores deep time of life and its co-evolution with matter, emphasising co-responsibility and respect for place and being. Her sculptures will be in the forthcoming Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi, 2026.
David Helmers
Helmers, a Canberra artist with a MFA from National Art School, is a studio artist at ANCA Mitchell. His installations of sculptural experimental porcelain forms explore the vulnerability of life, and reveal processes of emergence - adaption, transformation and transcendence. He has had many solo shows in Australia and has exhibited in Korea, Japan and China.
Ro Murray and Mandy Burgess
Murray and Burgess’ collaborative art practice is in Dhurag and Gundungurra country, Mt Victoria, NSW. After studying at the National Art School, they create large-scale sculptural installations on environmental issues, and wall murals with charcoal. They have exhibited in many sculpture festivals including three Canberra Art Biennials. They each maintain individual art practices.