2025-2026
356 unique lumen prints, each 8×10 on Ilford Multigrade FB Glossy
AIRSPACE PROJECTS
4-20 September, 2026
Opening 6-8pm, 4 Sept
Artist talks 12-2pm, 19 Sept
Throughout the 2025 calendar year, I made 356 8x10” lumen prints of my daily meditation. This was both an action of care for my mental health, but also an opportunity to listen deeply to Gadigal and Wangal Country, thereby exploring the late eco-philosopher Joanna Macy’s idea of “greening of the self” through prolonged, careful, attention to the natural world. Cumulatively, the prints record more than 59 hours of meditative listening, and being, in place.
breathing is situated at the intersection of self-portraiture, meditation practice and the history of lumen printing to record plant specimens. Central to the project are my ongoing interests in reciprocity, entanglement, and repair, and how I best inhabit the role of custodian as a white person of settler-coloniser ancestry in so-called Australia.
Tender (19 Sept - 5 October, 2025) explores acts of resistance and care. Emerging artist and curator Shelley Watters brings together Stephanie Beaupark, Eden Crain, Amani Haydar, Laurence Kimmel, Rochelle Morris, Kath O’Donnell, Emily Simek, Juundaal Strang-Yettica, Shelley Watters, Estelle Yoon and Wendy Qi Zhang - women artists of multiple ages, working across artistic disciplines, ideas, cultures and topographies. Together, these artists explore tenderness at the intersection of earth and people care.
Estelle Yoon, Amani Haydar and Eden Crain work across photo/video, painting and installation respectively, to explore familial tenderness, loss, and dislocation within their art. Rochelle Morris and Shelley Watters, grounded in ecofeminism, examine entanglement, land-trauma and grief through assemblages and installations - often with found or fallen living materials. Juundaal Strang-Yettica, uses her alter-ego Sister Gillternullius to pose new ways of working that are decolonised, relational, and social, to highlight the Anthropogenic environmental crisis. Stephanie Beaupark specialises in facilitating Indigenous-led knowledge exchange through the art and science of eco-dyeing. Emily Simek is interested in collective practices spanning digital art, textiles, installation, writing and gardening. Wendy Qi Zhang and Kath O’Donnell primarily use digital realms, to explore empathy, interconnectedness of creatures, cultures and technologies to create speculative futures. LaurenceKimmel’s oil painting practice expresses architectural visions of threshold and liminal spaces, with her painting installation for Tender depicting speculative habitats for the bilby in response to and in collaboration with O’Donnell’s work.
In The Land in Our Bones: Plancestral Herbalism and Healing Cultures from Syria to the Sinai, Lebanese American author Layla K. Feghali says “our feminism of soil and soul, is grounded in ﺃَﻣَﻞ amal “hope” as the abiding force, the core that continuously calls on us to return to it, to invigorate our search for, and action towards liberation…”.
Tender is supported by Inner West Council and includes an opening event, artist talks, a reading circle, and participatory performances. Events will be held each Saturday during the exhibition between 2-4pm.
Key information:
Tender
19 September – 5 October 2025
11am-5pm Thurs-Sun
Opening – Saturday 20 September, 2-4pm
Artist talks – Saturday 27 September, 2-4pm
Reading circle and closing cuppa – Saturday 4 October, 2-4pm
Chrissie Cotter Gallery, 31A Pidock St, Camperdown
Supported by Inner West Council https://www.innerwest.nsw.gov.au/live/living-arts/creative-spaces/chrissie-cotter-gallery
New Contemporaries, Sydney College of the Arts, 2024
Discarded ironing boards, community gifted non-native plants, repurposed hessian bags, thread, lumen print on Ilford Multigrade FB Classic gloss, WAV audio file (5:40), bluetooth headphones, 320 numbered endemic native seedlings. 3 x 5 x 5m.
My compost (ing) is an embodied artistic practice and methodology inspired by the concept of sympoiesis, or “making with” coined by Donna Haraway. Transforming Matter was a series of paired lumen prints of compost material, one was exhibited unfixed so decomposed throughout the exhibition and was fixed following its public decay.
My passion for compost stems from its power to transform, to evoke wonder and awe, and the potential it holds to generate energy, capture carbon, and create fertiliser.
Transforming Matter I, exhibited in Process (ed), Articulate Project Space, 2024
Transforming Matter II, exhibited in Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize, Muswellbrook Regional Gallery, 2024
Transforming Matter III & V, exhibited in Compost is so Hot, Airspace Projects, Marrickville, 2024
Transforming Matter IV, exhibited in Never Far from the Tree, Seaview St Gallery, 2024
Transforming Matter VI, exhibited in USU Creative Awards, Verge Gallery, 2024
Airspace Projects, 5-21 July 2024
COMPOST IS SO HOT explores compost (ing) as an embodied artistic practice and methodology. A new body of work spanning photo media, textiles, sculpture, and sound art, inspired by the concept of sympoiesis or “making with” coined by multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway.
My practice was situated at my children’s school in Sydney’s Inner West for much of the last 12 months, the 8 compost bins are the heart of the edible garden and my practice. To understand the temperature fluctuations, I monitored the compost bins between June 23-June 24, generating hundreds of images, recording changes of materiality, temporality, and climate.
“The physicality of composting: my collecting, layering, moving, and turning are actions of intent. The intent to replace, rejuvenate, and invigorate. In our world of extractive capitalism and endless consumption, I position composting as an act of repair.
“COMPOST IS SO HOT (the title) is inspired by a bumper sticker by ecosexuals, performance artists and activists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens. Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s maintenance art manifesto has also supported my ideas of what art is and can be. So much so that I made myself a “Compost Artist” badge, that I wear while I’m at work in the garden,” says Watters.
