Pop Songs in the Desert—Canberra Art Biennial
27 September - 9 November 2024
The Mixing Room Gallery at Thor’s Hammer
Curated by Tegan Garnett for the Canberra Art Biennial
Now in its fifth edition, Canberra Art Biennial presents a range of public art, contemporary art exhibitions, and events across multiple sites in 2024.
Thor’s Hammer is pleased to partner with the festival to present Pop Songs in the Desert in the Mixing Room Gallery.
Pop Songs in the Desert is a group exhibition featuring Aidan Hartshorn (Walgalu/Wiradjuri), Caro Pattle, Jacqueline Bradley, Jenna (Mayilema) Lee (Larrakia), Kirstie Rea, Luke Chiswell, and Nell.The show has been curated by Tegan Garnett.
For this exhibition, the curator invited contemporary artists from across the country to present artworks about Trees. In the show you will find objects that have been created from hand-blown and cast glass, xanthorrhoea woven from the pages of a book, branches and fruit stones cast from bronze, and tree bark manipulated into the shape of a canoe.
Presented above the timber recyclery of Thor’s Hammer, the artworks in this exhibition are contextualised by the process of reuse that is taking place downstairs. As the artworks live amongst the tables, chairs and other designed furniture that were once Trees, they sit in a context of processes and the lifecycle of a Tree.
‘Cycles’ and ‘processes’ reoccur amongst the artworks in the exhibition Jacqueline Bradley’s Calendar features the 38-week cycle of giving birth to new life. The casting process features in the artworks created by Nell, Luke Chiswell, and Jacqueline Bradley, where moulds are made and then filled with glass or bronze. Jenna (Mayilema) Lee and Caro Pattle both demonstrate different skills and techniques learned for weaving and repeating. Kirstie Rea captures the cycle of time by photographing the path in front of her through a sheet of glass, which also reflects what’s behind her and where she has been. Aidan Hartshorn transforms the surface of a tree into a functional canoe, using traditional processes taught to him by his dad.
While Thor’s Hammer offers a comfortable situation for artworks about Trees, the curator questions the place of art, and in particular art about Trees, amidst the global landscape of 2024.
What kind of times are these
When it’s almost a crime to talk about trees
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
This section of a poem written by Brecht in 1938 reflects on this exact problem disturbing the curator decades later. With intense injustice happening in the world, what good is talking about anything else, and what right do we have to be talking about Trees? Through the process of creating Pop songs in the desert, the exhibition artworks answer this question for Tegan. Hearing the stories and perspectives from the show's artists reaffirms the understanding that art plays the most important role in sharing our ideas and experiences with our communities.
Because you still listen.
Because in times like these, to have you listen at all
It’s necessary
To talk about trees.
60 years on Adrienne Rich writes in response to Brecht, reiterating the point that art (and in this case we will interpret it to mean art about Trees) is a powerful method through which to have important conversations.
In the often harrowing landscape of 2024, the curator hopes that this exhibition offers audiences a place to connect to the artist's stories and internal worlds, and to connect to and be inspired for a collective hope.
Exhibition Opening + Artist Conversation: 2pm Saturday 28 September
The curator will be joined by all seven exhibiting artists, to discuss the artworks and the context for the exhibition.
Join us for afternoon tea and a cuppa, as we hear from some of the country’s leading contemporary artists.
Please RSVP to creativeproducer@contour556.com.au.
Exhibiting ARTISTS
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Aidan Hartshorn
About the work
Madhawu Yiri (Heavy Light)
Madhawu Yiri (pronounced Mud-hore Yiry), explores the ongoing cultural and environmental impacts of the Industrialisation of Australia’s high country water systems. Through processes of water control, specifically by the damming of rivers, rising water levels impede and inhibit the continuation of cultural practices within ancient sites for Hartshorn’s people. As a Walgalu (Wolgalu, Wolgal) man, Hartshorn sheds light on his ancestral and present connection to these submerged spaces, creating his first Murrin (bark canoe) while commenting on the weight of loss and disadvantage for the production of electrical energy.
Wiradjuri Dictionary:
Muriin (bark canoe)
Madhawu (heavy, strong)
Yiri (beam of light)
About the artist
Walgalu (Wolgal, Wolgalu) and Wiradjuri peoples.
Born 1995, Wagga Wagga, NSW. Lives and works Kamberri/Canberra, ACT
Aidan Hartshorn is a Walgalu (Wolgalu, Wolgal) Wiradjuri man whose ancestral land resides in the High Country of Australia, parts of the Snowy Mountains in the Kosciuszko National Park and the Riverina region of NSW. His cross-disciplinary practice challenges settler-colonial histories tied to his Aboriginal and European ancestry and identity. Using both natural and industrial materials, his works address the impacts of industrialisation on Walgalu and Wiradjuri Country and culture. Hartshorn was Assistant Curator for the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial: Ceremony (2022) at the National Gallery of Australia and is currently Lecturer of Contemporary Art at the Australian National University’s School of Art and Design. Hartshorn presented his first major installation in 2024, titled These violent delights, at the Ian Potter Gallery at the National Gallery of Victoria as part of the Country Road + NGV First Nations Commissions.
More information: canberraartbiennial.com/artist/aidan-hartshorn
Caro Pattle
About the work
Lucky Sticks
Lucky Sticks takes the divination rod as an object with which to explore the magnetism of matter. To create the work, I wove glass beads, copper wire and synthetic taffeta to encapsulate eucalyptus limbs in tactile skins. Using branches foraged in Naarm’s inner north following cataclysmic contact between a tree and a reversing car (not mine), I’ve crafted the fated intimate embrace of distinct materials – wood, glass and fabric.
While divination rods are purported to channel earthly vibrations in order to lead the rod’s bearer to precious matter, Lucky Sticks imagines a relationship between material that is dynamic, powerful and most of all, not subservient to humankind. Let’s imagine the fateful union of car and tree not as the result of a distracted driver, but of wood singing to metal and glass sparkling at leaves. The young eucalyptus cracking like a green apple bitten, and the branches shivering and whispering in the night sky.
About the artist
Born 1985, Aotearoa (New Zealand). Naarm based since 2014.
Caro Pattle graduated from a Bachelor of Textiles at RMIT in 2019 with a previous Bachelor of Fine Arts completed in 2009. The recipient of several travel grants and industry prizes, she was named the Australian Textile Graduate of the Year by the Design Institute of Australia for 2020. Pattle’s work was presented by Craft at the 2022 & 2023 NGV Melbourne Design Fairs, and she has been selected to contribute to numerous group exhibitions nationally, including at the Australian Tapestry Workshop, the Jam Factory and FIN Gallery. In 2023, Pattle presented a commissioned work in Melbourne Now, Vessels at NGV Australia: Ian Potter Centre.
More information: canberraartbiennial.com/artist/caro-pattle
Jacqueline Bradley
About the work
Calendar
For the 2024 Biennial, Bradley presents a new body of work exploring replication and reproduction in human bodies and fruiting trees. Calendar is a series of 38 wall-based works taking the stone fruit as a starting point to examine organic cycles of growth and decay. In glass and bronze, these minimal and refined objects move between empty and full, marking the days, months and seasons. The imagery in Calendar draws on plum seeds, peach stones, and box liners used to hold soft fruit. Forms are replicated through casting; reusing moulds in multiple materials, pressing seeds into clay and utilising lost wax methods. These processes mimic the production of the fruit tray and the reproduction of the peach; a mould is used to make repeated forms, just as a fruit is made multiple by the tree, or a stone holds the potential for a future orchard.
About the artist
Dr Jacqueline Bradley is an artist and lecturer. Her practice is concerned with bodily relationships to the outdoors, and her recent work focuses on the peach, rich as it is with histories and associations of fertility, decay, and bodily metaphor.
She has exhibited and collaborated with artists and curators in Australia and internationally, including installations for the National Portrait Gallery, the European Touring exhibition, FuturoTextiles, and production of work for the Australian Embassy Gallery in Washington, D.C. Her practice is discussed in Columbia Universities Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, and she has developed major bodies of work for the Canberra Glassworks, Goulburn Regional Gallery, Canberra Contemporary Art Space and Craft Victoria.
Jacqueline lectures at the National Art School and works in both Sydney and Canberra.
More information: canberraartbiennial.com/artist/jac-bradley
Jenna (Mayilema) Lee (Larrakia)
About the work
Grasstrees
Over 100 years ago, the words ‘linguistic poverty’ were printed and distributed in the Australian Aboriginal Native Words and Their Meanings national handbook to describe First Peoples languages. Statements such as these were written, repeated and spread in various ‘Aboriginal Language’ dictionaries and presented as fact. These books were widely published for decades to provide “those who are in search for names of houses, children, boats and other purposes, will find a rich treasury of words native to their own land…”
While simultaneously being dispossessed from land and waters and having children stolen, our words were served up with no correction to people or place for the leisurely consumption of settlers. These so-called dictionaries published our words with no context or connection to people or places. With over 250 languages, including 800 dialectal variants, these books homogenise our people, reinforcing harmful misrepresentations that persist today.
My ongoing body of work transforms these fraudulent books into thriving Xanthorrhoea (Grass trees), a pyrophytic plant that thrives under elemental forces of deconstruction and reconstruction. In doing so, I state that our languages have always been abundantly rich and that our prosperity is multifaceted – from the sheer number of unique languages spoken to the rich depth of connection, our words provide us, as well as the collective effort of our people to reinvigorate languages.
About the artist
Jenna Lee is a First Nations Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman and KarraJarri Saltwater woman with mixed Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Anglo-Australian (Irish and Scottish) ancestry. Driven to create work that transforms the scars of colonialism, Lee builds on a foundation of her father’s staunch teachings of culture and her mother’s gentle teachings of paper craft.
With a practice focused on materiality, ancestral material culture and Gulumerridjin knowledge-based method and process, Lee interrogates notions of the archive, histories of colonial collecting, and the lies presented within settler-colonial books and texts. Lee ritualistically analyses, deconstructs, and reconstructs these source materials, language and books, transforming them into forms of cultural beauty and pride.
Lee’s work, primarily in immersive installations, includes objects, works on paper, and multi-media. In these, she demonstrates the transformative power of First Nations’ ways of being, thinking, and doing on the materials, legacies, and environmental conditions inherited through colonialism.
More information: canberraartbiennial.com/artist/jenna-mayilema-lee
Kirstie Rea
About the work
Untitled
I leave the house, exploring places beyond the suburban. Place soaks deep under my skin and wraps around me. Being there.
I record being there with camera, a sheet of glass, and my body.
The surface of the glass offering a reflection of what is behind me, where I have been, laid over the way forward that is seen through the glass. The two views stitched together.
Reveal. Each moment of pause reveals new details, a wonder of place, moment, light, and presence.
Back home memory and being there cling to me.
About the artist
As an independent visual artist based in Kamberri/Canberra Kirstie’s works in glass explore her love of and care for places outside city limits, beyond the urban fringe.
At the core of this investigation lies a desire to seek an understanding of our often-tenuous connections to place. Walking in these places, seeking solitude and distance, Kirstie draws on her photography and writing to inform her making. Alongside this inquiry is Kirstie’s in-depth knowledge of her primary material glass, and the processes she employs to create her work.
Kirstie balances her arts practice between her studio, mentoring and teaching workshops nationally and internationally.
More information: canberraartbiennial.com/artist/kirstie-rea
Luke Chiswell
About the work
Self-Sabotage
Self-Sabotage by Luke Chiswell delves into humanity’s interconnectedness with the environment by utilising the very tool that determines the fate of the material it once was. This sand-casted bronze sculpture features an axe head at the top, with the handle transforming into organic branches. The preserved wood grain emphasises the transition from life to death. Chiswell’s work highlights the mutual destruction impact of human actions on nature, considering our environmental impact and engaging with contemporary concerns of ecology and our relationship to nature.
About the artist
Luke Chiswell was born in Collector, New South Wales.
Language serves as a foundation to Luke Chiswell’s multidisciplinary practice. A gestural vocabulary in which words and marks are infused with energy, meaning and mis-meaning. Chiswell’s large action paintings, screen-prints and sculptures focus on language and are developed through a performative practice between intended composition and deliberate chance. Text moves from legible to abstract evoking an intuitive response to mark making. The use of scale and crop are crucial and phrases of interest never fully disclosed.
More information: canberraartbiennial.com/artist/luke-chiswell
Nell
About the work
On a withered branch, a ghost blooms
My multifaceted art practice explores oppositional thresholds and the fertile spaces that exist beyond the binary: from intimate to immersive, found to fabricated, high to low culture, two-dimensions to three-dimensions, individual to collaborative, ancient to contemporary, sacred to profane.
This oppositional tension (and reconciliation) is evident in titles of the three works, On a withered branch, a ghost blooms, presented here in Pop Songs in the Desert for the Canberra Art Biennial. How can something be in a state of withering and blooming at the same time? How are both these things true? This understanding is borne out in the material difference between the delicate, flowing form of the glass ghosts with the angular and withered steel branches. Blacksmithing and glass-blowing are both ancient techniques of transforming materials through fire. I’m very attracted to that elemental process and how the utilitarian, industrial and artistic applications of blacksmithing and glass-blowing overlap.
Ghosts first appeared in my paintings in 2005 after a period of self-investigation and psychotherapy. Since then, the ghost has become a recurring, yet malleable subject and motif. I was thinking about how the ghosts of our past make us who we are in the present and if we can become friends with them, they might guide us into the future. My entire art practice is about the friction and harmony of opposites and I loved that this ghost form hovered somewhere between an ancient demon and a Pop culture descendent of Pac-Man. And that the ghost was simultaneously a little bit scary and a little bit friendly.
About the artist
Nell is a multidisciplinary artist based on Gadigal land in the Eora Nation, Sydney. She studied at the Sydney College of the Arts, University of California and Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Her work fuses mythological, spiritual and popular cultural iconography to explore the complexities of the human condition, personal growth, transformation, femininity, cycles of life and death, and perceived dichotomies of existence. Nell has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally.
Represented by STATION Gallery.
More information: canberraartbiennial.com/artist/nell
Key Details
EXHIBITION DATES: 27 September - 9 November 2024
Exhibition Opening + Artist Conversation: 2pm Saturday 28 September. RSVP to creativeproducer@contour556.com.au
WHERE: The Mixing Room Gallery at Thor’s Hammer, 10 Mildura St, Griffith, ACT.
GALLERY HOURS: Monday - Friday 8-4.30pm and Saturdays 10-2pm.
ENTRY DETAILS: No tickets or bookings required to view exhibition.
Please note: The Mixing Room Gallery is located up two flights of stairs. If you have mobility issues, we're very sorry but we are unable to cater for your needs. Our greatest apologies.
COMMUNITY PARTNERS
CAPITAL BREWING CO.
Thanks to Capital Brewing Co. for their ongoing support of our exhibition opening events at The Mixing Room Gallery. Capital is a B-Corp Certified, Canberra born and bred institution and Australia’s first Climate Active certified 100% carbon neutral brewery!
Here at The Mixing Room Gallery, we curate artists and exhibitions that align with the environmental ethos of Thor’s Hammer as a business. Having support from like-minded partners like Capital Brewing Co. is incredibly important to us, and to the integrity of the Mixing Room Gallery program.
THREE MILLS BAKERY
Three Mills Bakery has recently come on board as one of our community partners, supplying delicious nibbles for our opening events at a discounted rate. Three Mills is a fixture of Canberra culture, producing delicious sourdough bread and laminated pastries using house-milled flour, local ingredients and traditional long fermentation techniques.
They’re a community-minded, purposeful local business and we’re grateful for their support as we continue to bring together the Canberra arts community for events at The Mixing Room Gallery.
BRINDABELLA HILLS WINERY
Brindabella Hills Winery is our newest community partner, contributing ‘cool climate elegance in a glass’ to our opening events. Brindabella Hills vineyard and winery is situated 25km north of Canberra on a ridge above the Murrumbidgee. The protected site of the property, with its well drained granite soils, offers a perfect environment for the production of premium grapes for table wines.
Established in 1986 and having recently undergone extensive renovations, we love the ethos and passion shown by owner Michael Anderson and winemaker Brian Sinclair. With 21 vintages now behind them, they have established the potential for premium wine production in the Canberra region.