Sera Waters
Hugo Michell Gallery invites you to the opening of Sera Waters’ ‘Dazzleland’ and Kenny Pittock’s ‘Every Kind of Shape’.
Sera Waters is a South Australia-based artist, arts writer, and academic. Waters’ art practice is characterised by a darkly-stitched meticulousness. In particular, she specialises in blackwork, and revels in repetitiveness, pattern, and crafting. Waters’ embroideries and hand-crafted sculptures dwell within the gaps of Australian settler colonial histories, examining the home-making practices of women and her own genealogical ghostscapes.
In ‘Dazzleland’, Waters further examines her ancestral past: “My ancestors arrived in waves upon Australian shores attracted by the dazzle of this land: its sunshine, mineral booms, grassed open spaces, and new opportunities to build rich lives. In making their homes and living across Australia, particularly upon Kaurna and Bunganditj Country, many were implementers of colonising change, such as planning widespread drainage, laying bitumen, marking boundaries, mining, purveying merchandise, farming livestock, and clearing and covering land with non-native species. Evidence from their lives show they gave little consideration to the knowledge and carefully-balanced ecologies which had been operating in Australia for centuries. This exhibition looks at the repercussions upon regions which have been exploited, altered, and had the ‘dazzle’ removed without due care, and without knowledge of the specificities of Country. Through the works of ‘Dazzleland’ I am asking what it means to inherit this intergenerational blindness, as well how we go forward living in this dazzling aftermath, when today what shimmers most is the scorching heat beating upon a dry and damaged land.”
This exhibition has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
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Kenny Pittock is a Melbourne-based artist who employs humour and sentimentality to playfully respond to contemporary Australian culture, exploring the overlaps and boundaries between the public and the personal. Pittock works across a large range of mediums, including ceramics, drawing, text, and photography.
Kenny has exhibited across Australia and internationally, including at the Museum of Old and New Art, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, the Monash University Museum of Art, Artspace in Sydney, and Galleria 291 in Rome, Italy. Pittock’s work is held in collections including the City of Melbourne State Collection and the Melbourne University Union Collection.
Please join us in celebrating the launch of these two incredible exhibitions on May 16!
Hugo Michell Gallery acknowledges the Kaurna people as the traditional custodians of the Adelaide region, and that their cultural and heritage beliefs are still as important to the living Kaurna people today.
Congratulations to Sera Waters, who has been selected as a Finalist in the Ramsay Art Prize!
Held every two years, the Ramsay Art Prize invites submissions from Australian artists under 40 working in any medium.
Finalists will be exhibited in a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia from May 25 to August 25, with the winner announced on May 24.
Through the generosity of the James & Diana Ramsay Foundation, the winning work is acquired by AGSA.
The Australian Tapestry Workshop presents its Artist-in-Residence exhibition, featuring the work of 15 artists who participated in residencies in 2016, including Sera Waters!
Of the piece, Waters says:
This towel, Fashioning Locals, is from a larger series of towels, each telling passed along tales from Australia’s settler colonial and domestic histories. Though towels are often dismissed as innocuous, they have intimate relationships with their owners. They dry bodies, offer warmth and protection, wipe away dirt and soak up spills, and are subject to regimes of homely repetitive care … often for decades. They witness all kinds of goings on, and sometimes even get passed along family lines. The towels of this series are all pre-loved, have somewhat faded patterns, and are marked and worn from such exposure.
Home-based textiles, including towels and embroidery, have often had a penchant for translating nature (from outside) into comforting, decorative and idealised versions to live with inside. The embroidery and textile collage upon this towel weaves a not-so-comforting story around the part my ancestor played in domesticating her surroundings, in a specific time and region in our history. In a plethora of palm pattern she stands proudly, not wearing a fashionable fox fur, but sporting a Toolache wallaby, a now extinct species which inhabited the south east of South Australia. I use needlework to recognise and question intergenerational legacies and I push traditions into discomfiting territories with an aim of shifting trajectories.
Exhibition opens Tuesday, May 16 from 6 to 8pm, and runs from May 17 to July 7.
For more information head here.
Sera Waters has been announced as the WINNER of the Heysen Prize for Landscape 2016! A huge congratulations to Sera, for taking out this $15,000 acquisitive prize.
“The Heysen Prize was established by the Hahndorf Academy in 1997 to commemorate the nationally and internationally eminent local artist, Sir Hans Heysen (1877-1968).
Sir Hans Heysen had a deep connection with the Australian landscape and is famous for his paintings and drawings of Hahndorf in the Adelaide hills, and the Flinders Ranges. He documented village life in Hahndorf and conserved the mature gums in the surrounding area. Because of the implied realism of his pictures, many think of his art as literal depictions of the landscape that existed in front of him.”
You can see her winning work along with the other finalists at the Hahndorf Academy until December 4th. More details here
Congratulations to James Dodd, Paul Sloan and Sera Waters who have all been selected as finalists in the Heysen Prize for Landscape 2016. Established in 1997 by the Hahndorf Academy, the Heysen Prize commemorates the life and career of renown Australian landscape painter Sir Hans Heysen.
This acquisitive, biennial prize is worth $15,000 and will be exhibited at the Hahndorf Academy from the 8th of October till the 4th of December. The winner will be announced at the launch on Saturday the 8th of October.
For more information, click here.
Slipstitch a touring exhibition curated by Dr. Belinda von Mengersen has arrived at Latrobe Regional Gallery. Featuring the work of Lucas Grogan and Sera Waters, Slipstitch considers the growing pursuit of figurative embroidery in contemporary art. Giving reference to embroidery as a traditional tool for autobiographical story telling the exhibition includes a diverse group of emerging and established artists.
“In recent years contemporary artists in Australia have embraced embroidery for its capacity for poignant and reflective narrative. The re-emergence of embroidery is part of a broader questioning of the hierarchy of materials that has gained momentum since the 1990s. Embroidered objects have often been read literally and relegated within a domestic framework. These new contemporary works break down preconceptions by exploring what embroidery can become once it transcends the regularity of pattern and decoration. Historically, embroidery like the Bayeux Tapestry, was used as a tool for personal or political narratives. Slipstitch aims to introduce a contemporary audience to the capacity of embroidery for drawing and communication in this mode.”
This exhibition has been touring regionally since 2015 and will open in Bendigo on the 28th of May and run till the 26th of June you can find out more about this exhibition here.
Hugo Michell Gallery is thrilled to announce that Sera Waters has joined its roster of represented artists!
Waters is an Adelaide-based artist whose mixed-media soft-sculpture works are imbued with a dark and emotive meticulousness. Waters thinks of her practice as a process of “exorcising fears”; a way to work through the ideas, attitudes and stories that underpin our lives and often go unexamined. She is a master of her trade – especially of needlework and embroidery – and the extensive time and labour required by her practice mirrors her devotion to its narrative explorations and conceptual concerns.
Waters first showed at Hugo Michell Gallery in 2015, with Spectre Folk. We can’t wait to exhibit more of her spectacular work!
Have a look at her artist profile here.
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