Curated by independent arts writer and administrator Chloé Wolifson, World Material brings together the work of a diverse group of female Australian artists, both established and emerging. Connie Anthes, Rebecca Gallo, Eloïse Kirk, Michelle Nikou, Lisa Sammut, Lotte Schwerdtfeger, Yasmin Smith, and Louise Weaver each deploy material and conceptual means to explore such antithetical binaries as representation and abstraction, the real and the fictional, accident and intention.
As Wolifson suggests in her essay, although World Material embodies a sense of expanded possibilities, it also establishes resonances and connections between the artists’ works. These resonances are more apparent in certain works, most obviously in the upstairs groupings that allowed for more expansive installations and connections. Allusions to landscape and place are particularly redolent in Smith’s and Schwerdtfeger’s works. Smith’s Ntara Fence delivers a sense of surprise with its technically adept hyperrealism—only on very close inspection does one realize that the river...