Catherine Anselmi, Becoming and Unbecoming (Detail), 2024. Image courtesy of artist.
Catherine Anselmi, David Helmers, Ro Murray, Mandy Burgess
Gallery 1
Opening Thursday 30 July, 2026, 6-8pm
Friday 31 July - Sunday 26 August
The three artists - Catherine Anselmi, David Helmers and the collaboration Murray and Burgess - show how unruliness - an often-unacknowledged aspect of artmaking - is important in their varied practices.
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, but these artists lean into unruliness, pushing the boundaries into the new and unexpected, opening new worlds.
These artists embrace unruliness in different ways:
through the risk of presenting their ongoing experimentation with their mediums, which acknowledges time and process rather than outcome;
by allowing their materials agency, acknowledging that some processes cannot be fully controlled, by risking precarity and failure;
accepting the unpolished, the sketch, the imperfect, which reveals the artist’s hand and the materials’ liveliness in the process of transformation;
by approaching themes sideways, allowing viewers to form meanings through their own subliminal responses to material and form;
by allowing the space of potential;
by the embodiment of process and gesture;
by evoking movement rather than stillness.
Catherine Anselmi's tall and precarious clay totems of Becoming and Unbecoming spin out almost to the point of collapse. Her work tells stories of life and its co-evolution with matter, echoing geological processes within the Earth’s lithosphere where rocks and minerals shift, meld and break under slow and violent forces. Open to possibilities - in making, in her materials and in the work of time - her work is in continuous flux.
In his work Collapse, David Helmer's experimental collaboration with porcelain, fabric and chance produces translucent forms, which acknowledge fragility but also celebrate the persistence life requires to endure through adaption, transformation and transcendence.
In *Passion, Murray and Burgess's unruly process of jointly making charcoal drawings to celebrate the women elders of Australian art allows the emergence of a lively presence through shifting, impermanent lines. Chance resonances are openly invited by the stacking on the floor of plywood glyphs from their ongoing work on the Regent Honeyeater underneath, and flighty drawings of the birds above.