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exhibitions

2017

4 to 26 March

Susan Jenkins
Annalise Rees
Stephanie Radok
Sue Kneebone
Lee Salomone
Kylie Waters
Irmina van Niele
Honor Freeman

Honor Freeman is an Adelaide based artist whose practice involves crafting objects that belie their materiality and purpose. Freeman completed her studies (with Honours) in 2001 at the South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia. Following graduation, Freeman took up an Associate position and later a Tenant residency in the ceramics studio at JamFactory Contemporary Craft & Design. Her work has been curated into major exhibitions at institutions throughout Australia, including the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Primavera 2007, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, and Adelaide’s Samstag Museum. She has undertaken international residencies at Guldagergaard, Denmark’s International Ceramic Museum and in the US at Indiana University’s School of Art & Design. In 2006 Freeman travelled to Chile to exhibit and participate in the The South Project and to continue her ongoing project on/off/on, installing slipcast porcelain light switches and powerpoints clandestinely in public spaces.
Freeman has been exhibiting since 2000 and her work is held in numerous private collections as well as important public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia, ArtBank, Deakin University Art Gallery and Washington DC’s National Museum of Women in the Arts in the United States. Freeman’s porcelain works feature in the publication 101 Contemporary Australian artists, published by the National Gallery of Victoria.

Susan Jenkins has re-engaged with painting in the last year or two. She completed a fine arts degree with the South Australian School of Art, majoring in painting, but ever since, has had a professional life in the arts as a curator and arts administrator so any engagement with art on a personal level has taken the shape of line drawings in sketchbooks. She returned to Adelaide around ten years ago to live in the Port Adelaide area, where she was born and has family and childhood connections.  Here she has enjoyed being part of a strong social, political and creative community through engagement with heritage advocacy and cultural mapping. Out of this association came an invitation to participate in an exhibition in the Port around the theme of 'grit'. It saw her make a small group of landscape paintings on planks of weatherboard. These works here are an extension of that first little body of work. Looking for subjects amenable to the format. Looking for the quiet place. Looking for beauty and value in the apparently overlooked.  

Sue Kneebone’s installation tableau incorporates the transformative process of bricolage and photomontage to evoke a sense of the Australian gothic. The material hybridity in her works seek to create an uneasy tension between the unspoken interiority of Australian colonial society at the far edges of empire and the duplicity of colonisation as committed ‘in the interests of human kind’.  Sue’s intention is to draw the viewer in to consider more insidious subtexts such as disturbed ecologies and dispossession from colonial incursions. A combination of field trips and archival research into her family past have fostered a deeper understanding of the inherited and ongoing legacies of colonial settler culture.
Sue has completed a PhD, South Australian School of Art, UniSA, Adelaide and has a strong exhibition history, in 2016 alone exhibitions were: Silent Nature, a group exhibition at Jam Factory’s Seppeltsfield Gallery; Illusions of History,  SALA group exhibition, Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide; Sue Kneebone, Art Gallery of South Australia, curated by Elle Freak; and Border Crossings, held at Galway Arts Centre, Galway Festival of Arts, Ireland and SASA Gallery, University of South Australia, Adelaide

Stephanie Radok is an artist, writer, and editor. She is the co-author of Julie Blyfield (2007), the fifth in the Wakefield Press series of books on South Australian artists. In 2012 Wakefield Press published Radok’s non-fiction art-memoir An Opening: twelve love stories about art. In 2013 the book was longlisted for the inaugural national major literary award for literature written by women The Stella Prize and the Nita B. Kibble Literary Award. Radok first showed her art at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide in 1977 in The Women’s Show. She studied at Canberra School of Art from 1982-85 and received an MA from the South Australian School of Art in 2002. Radok has had eighteen solo exhibitions since The Garden of Earthly Delights at Bitumen River Gallery in Canberra in 1986. In 2011 at Flinders University Art Museum City Gallery her survey exhibition The Sublingual Museum combined selected works from the Flinders University Collection with her works spanning 33 years of practice. A few examples of her art can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canberra, the National Gallery of Victoria and Flinders University Art Museum.

Annalise Rees is a visual artist originally from the rugged south coast of Kangaroo Island. Currently completing a doctorate at the Tasmanian College of the Arts, Annalise has exhibited across Australia and been an artist in residence in Tokyo, New Delhi, Sydney, Hill End and Darwin. Annalise’s work is informed by historical practices of exploration, navigation and cartography. With a particular focus on the maritime environment, Annalise has recently been investigating how physical and metaphorical manifestations of the unknown drive searching and enquiry for both artist and explorer alike. She has spent many months at sea on a professional crayfishing boat off Tasmania’s coast and as an official voyage artist on board the Marine National Facility’s research vessel Investigator on a two-month voyage to Heard and McDonald Island’s in the sub-Antarctic.

Lee Salomone, BA Uni SA, uses everyday found things to make his art, he is of Italian-Australian heritage and his work has reflected rural Italian knowledge. He works in installation, photography, sculpture and he also makes works on paper. Lauren Sutter artlink March 2008 commented on Lee’s work: “Lee Salomone's reclaimed objects have histories with roots both strong and deep. His works speak in silent reveries of earthy sound: the peeling of paint, the cracking of wood and the slow bending of rusted metal. Each object stems from its own long narrative, largely predating its exhibition status.” Lee has a strong exhibition history in Germany and Australia with works shown  regularly in Berlin, Adelaide and Melbourne.  A particularly noteworthy project was other voices, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, September 2012, a contemplative installation that explored migration as a physical and symbolic passage. The work played an important role in the reconstruction of immigrant identity. Other voices was an installation created from wooden and metal planks belonging to Mediterranean migrant workers. These workers arrived in Australia post World War II by sea, and the planks at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation were metaphors for both the sea voyage that took place and the spiritual passage that occurred from known to unknown.

Irmina van Niele, PhD Uni SA, 2006, grew up in Amsterdam and spent her adolescence in Paris and London, arriving in Australia in 1973. Irmina’s art practice includes gallery and public work in sculpture, installation and textiles. The broad focus of her research is on the human experience of belonging, in relation to geographical, linguistic and cultural dislocation. There is a strong autobiographical aspect to her work, that deals with the meanings attached to the experience of being in and out of place, and memories of city spaces, traversed in the past, re-imagined in the present.  Transience versus attachment, and loss as presence, continue to be central questions in her work.  Her work has become increasingly focussed on childhood experience, in a psychoanalytical and perhaps existential sense. Alienation, isolation and emotional lack have surfaced as significant, complex facets. Recent work includes a series of garment like objects, knitted from discarded plastic bags. The implied link with childhood is significant. Alluding to fragmented memories the artist looks for insight into personal issues that are also quite universal.

Kylie Waters completed a Masters, Uni SA, 2004 and has a strong exhibition history with works shown at the JamFactory, SASA Gallery, Ayers House and other exhibitions at the University of Melbourne, Linden Gallery and the Victorian Arts Centre. Kylie is interested in exploring issues of identity, concepts of histories, cross cultural experiences and interactions. A family connection to the Barossa Valley, SA and Hermannsburg Mission in Central Australia led to her interest and was the topic of, her post graduate research.  Her Post Graduate research looked at the role of German Lutheran missions in the changing understandings of Indigenous Australian Art. Kylie held an exhibition titled New Ceramics:  Journeys and Place; Exchanges in a Cultural Landscape at the Jam Factory in 2005. With her background knowledge of technical skills in working with clay, the artist uses the medium to investigate conceptually and experiment through ideas, forms and textures.  Kylie also uses textiles, as well as found and historical objects shared down through generations of her family, seeking to create a link between past and present.  Kylie uses the old German script in her work, which was a tradition with a strong connection to the Lutheran settlers' homeland, and a cultural practice that is still continued by a small number of people.  Kylie has explored the historic roles of women at Hermannsburg mission, the kinds of activities practiced by wives of Lutheran missionaries and pastors and by the Indigenous women living in and around the mission. “The white on white embroidery introduced to the mission by Frieda Strehlow is of particular interest to my work, as are the other kinds of important jobs done by the women such as cooking, doing the laundry, the gardening, milking and sewing.”