Conduit by Sam Matthewman / Mining Memory by Anindita Banerjee, Avrille Burrows, Minaal Lawn, Monica Rani Rudhar & Sarra Tzijan
Sam Matthewman
Sam Matthewman is a contemporary artist based in Australia whose work explores the intersection between art and performance. After completing a Bachelor of Contemporary Art at the University of South Australia in 2021, Matthewman continued their learning with mentors of Ida Sophia and Jascha Boyce, and with international residencies of the British School at Rome. This multidisciplinary education has informed their artistic practice, which incorporates a wide range of media, including ceramics, cotton rope, installation, and filmed circus.
Their work often reflects their interest in exploring the relationship between the body and materials, particularly in the context of live performance. They are known for creating immersive installations that invite viewers to engage with the artworks in a tactile and interactive way. Their performances often incorporate elements of circus and physical theatre, using their training in acrobatics and clowning to create dynamic and expressive movements.
In their recent work, Matthewman has focused on exploring themes of identity and belonging, drawing on their queer experience. They are interested in the ways in which materials and textures can evoke feelings of comfort and familiarity, while also serving as a reminder of the complexity and diversity of individual experiences.
Matthewman’s artworks have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia and internationally, including at the Adelaide Contemporary Experimental, FELTspace, and the Romanian Academy in Rome. They have also collaborated with other artists and performers on a range of interdisciplinary projects, including installations, film, and live performance. An award-winning performer, Sam has participated at a number of festivals and events, including the Adelaide Fringe Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Consciously aware of the space in which one occupies and the way in which one does it – there is a warmth, a tenderness, a strength, a slight peculiarity. There is the showmanship of a performer and the craftsmanship of an artist. There is repetition, a mirroring, a continuum, movement, momentum.
The title, Conduit, references the energy flow of a performer, Sam Matthewman’s role as the middle tier in trio acrobatics, and PVC piping or conduit used in their artwork.
Synthetic Sinews has evolved each time it has been presented. Central to this sculpture is a reoccurring element in Matthewman’s work – a ceramic elbow bent at an acute 45-degree angle, “cast from a fellow acrobat”. It is a curious object fixed in a flexed acrobatic hold, though it could be the cradle for a baby’s head or a cellists’ right arm positioned on the strings. The suspended elbow is balanced in the inner apex of the piped structure, held with ropes, creating a tension between the materials and the act at play. From the ends of hollow ceramic, dangles French knitted orange rope armatures.
The same cotton ropes are incorporated as curtain tiebacks in the other installation Curtain Call. The frame of both works appear as pitched circus tents or the silhouette of a home.
These large-scale installations combine cold and hard, with soft and natural materials creating an intriguing contrast that is arresting and perplexing, calling the viewer forth to look closer. Consisting of many other beautiful binaries with performance and craft, manufactured and handmade, macro and micro, external and internal, masculine and feminine. The artist talked about their childhood memories spending time with their father visiting homes in his mobile plumbing van, “I wonder if my use of ceramic elbows in my practice originated from my paternal lineage. An often procedure on these outings was replacing ceramic piping with Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) tubing. I recall as a child being commented on by hegemonic masculine figures when expressing a keen interest in knitting.”
There are many elements within Matthewman’s work that reference the body and connect with material functionality. The artist talked about veins in the human body, and our digestive system being like water and waste plumbing, muscle fibres and hair like thread, yarn, rope, existing in both craft and trade realms.
Matthewman straddles multiple disciplines and materials with a grace and confidence that is akin to someone much their senior. Committed to bringing circus to the gallery, this exhibition, Conduit, is no exception.
Polly Dance
Curator + arts writer based on Kaurna land (Adelaide, South Australia)
Sam Matthewman, Curtain Call, 2023, glow poi act recording (4:11), velvet curtains, cotton rope, (indicative).
Sam Matthewman, Synthetic Sinews, 2023, sculpture, slipcast ceramic stoneware, cotton rope, reclaimed pipes made of PVC, salt glazed ceramic & aluminium, 150x15x220 cm.
Anindita Banerjee
Anindita Banerjee, a twice uprooted Indian, is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and researcher that lives and works on the land of the Wadawurrung people of the Kulin Nation. Using gestural portrayals of hybrid rituals, she wonders where her place as an immigrant is on the unceded indigenous lands of present day Australia.
Minaal Lawn
Dja Dja Wurrung | Glenlyon based contemporary artist Minaal Lawn (b.1977) makes ceramic works that celebrate the reconciliation of her Indian heritage with her Australian upbringing. Her work examines the transformation from an inherited culture, revisiting childhood stories and object symbolism, to one that is owned.
Arville Burrows
Avrille Burrows is an Indian born Naarm based artist utilising textile processes as a conduit to cultural and historical exploration. Her experience as a mental health clinician draws in theory of intergenerational trauma and practices of recovery and repair, and formulates it into a spiritual and physical form.
Monica Rani Rudhar
Born to Indian and Romanian migrants, Monica Rani Rudhar is a multidisciplinary artist who’s work navigates the cultural disconnections of her multi-racial ethnicity. Her work is delicately personal and takes the shape of a restorative archive that seeks to record her own histories where these stories can exist permanently.
Sarra Tzijan
Sarra Tzijan is an Indian-Australian artist originally from Naarm, now based in Pukatja. She has completed a degree in Communication Design, an Advanced Diploma of Object and Jewellery Design and an Associateship at JamFactory. Tzijan currently works at Ernabella Arts as the Studio Manager.
The threads that hold this exhibition together are conscientious attempts to hold onto and unpack things that have passed. Memories of a different time, practices of another generation and experiences of displaced rituals, all as abstract excerpts of personal histories rendered tangible through material practice. The artists of Mining Memory are critical activators of contemporary art practice who mine their conscious and unconscious archives to contemplate the material possibilities of their memories.
Body and land merged as one, The Smell of Orange incorporates the colour and smell of henna drying on skin and hair, and the dye bath of eucalyptus cinerea, two lands, both home to Avrille Burrows. Hair embedded as evidence of time, Woman as Mountain is testament to instinctive matriarchal qualities of strength and empathy.
The knotted form Minaal Lawn’s work represents a contortion. While in Hindu culture it can mean a trapping of spirits, in Not Wall Minaal has shifted its power and claimed the story for herself through repetition and colour. Adorned Vessels continues Lawn’s fascination with sculptural elements of traditional Hindu temple architecture. The concept of Murti (idol of worship) is abstracted through a recontextualization of the vessel beyond a container.
Sarra Tzijan’s Village Vessels question the division between the seen and the screened. In the duality of bronze and glass the metaphor is complicated by notions of resistance. The visceral materiality and the temporal sensibility makes evident to the viewers the processes of making in response to haptic memory.
Monica Rani Rudhar’s photographic works celebrate Indian Yellow, a pigment made in the bladder of a cow fed only mango leaves and water. In We Were Connected In A More Complicated Way Than Either Of Us Could Even Begin To Understand Rudhar examines her familial narratives and the representation of cows in Hinduism, drawing parallels to the sacred connection between her mother and her pet cow.
As the red soil trickles onto the heart of the traditional rice flour drawing, in Settle Banerjee negotiates her way through the complicacies of her Home and Away. Made on the lands of the Wadawurrung people and now on the lands of the Kaurna People, Banerjee continues to wonder where her place is as an immigrant to the unceded indigenous lands of present-day Australia.
Curated by Dr. Anindita Banerjee Mining Memory is an exhibition that feeds from the past and prototypes the future. It is informed by artists who experiment the shifting containment and understanding of home influenced by migration. The mining of memories through abstract patternology, participatory acts and undefinable use of materials hold this exhibition together. attentiveness to the interplay of light on surface, be it the abalone, the salt flat or the bitumen, and asks us: is the shimmer a sign of life or merely a trick of the light?
Anindita Banerjee
Anindita Banerjee is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and researcher that lives and works on the land of the Wadawurrung people of the Kulin Nation.
Minaal Lawn, Adorned Vessel No.16 (For Delight), 2023.
Anindita Banerjee, Settle, 2018, slumped glass bowl, spliced solid braid nylon rope, metal links, red sand, rice flour.
Sarra Tzijan, Village Vessels, 2022, Bronze and Glass.