Murray Bridge Regional Gallery warmly invites you to join us in celebrating two powerful exhibitions.
Deborah Prior: ON THE THIRD DAY
Blanket and body ecologies: fragile bodies and difficult questions begun ‘on the sheep’s back’.
Deborah Prior is an Adelaide-based textile and performance artist whose Feminist practice explores themes including bodily agency, chronic illness, climate justice and the personal and social histories of domestic work. She meticulously knits, stiches and unpicks threads to address the deeply anxious state of attempting to live well on an unwell planet.
Prior’s work also addresses our urgent ecological and social crises, while interrogating the painful realities of (ongoing) colonisation in Australia, a country said to have ‘begun on the sheep’s back’.
These works are the outcomes of Prior’s three-week residency in the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park, having been awarded Country Arts SA’s annual Grindell’s Hut artist-in-residence in 2021.
Since its original presentation at JamFactory Seppeltsfield in 2022, this exhibition iteration includes new works.
Image: Deborah Prior, Grandmothers remembering Acacia blossoms falling after the rain (detail), 2022, woollen blankets, wool and cotton yarns, eucalyptus dyed wool, glass beads, studio ephemera, 220 x 129 x 150cm. Photo: Sam Roberts
Rose Walker: COASTAL LAYERS
First solo exhibition by expert local ceramicist whose artworks express the constant change and unpredictability of the land and give a sensitive impression of a place and time.
Her wheel-thrown forms provide a quiet surface with a combination of glazes that reflect the vastness of her landscapes. She employs the process of glaze-on-glaze to “create a materialised reflection of personal meaning, making and memory”.
Walker’s most recent endeavours include porcelain slip-casting with a combination of intaglio printing and monotype techniques, as well as exploring Japanese Nerikomi that uses slabs of different coloured clays, stacked, folded, pressed into logs, sliced and arranged to form patterns.
Growing up in Penneshaw on Kangaroo Island surrounded by water, with endless views of the ocean and its magnificent rugged and ever changing coastline, it was inevitable that I would choose this landscape as an inspiration for my passion. I pursued painting and drawing before ceramics and have always gravitated towards landscape impressionism which has been my main source of inspiration – in transferring this to clay.
ROSE WALKER PENNESHAW, 2024, PORCELAIN, 11 X 6 X 10CM. PHOTO: ROSE WALKER
