News

Hugo Michell Gallery welcomes the addition of Sam Gold to our represented artists!

Sam Gold is a South Australian artist living and working on Kaurna Yerta (the Adelaide Plains). Gold turned their hand to ceramics in earnest in 2018, bringing over a decade of training in Transpersonal Art Therapy (Ikon Institute), Furniture Design (TafeSA) and studies in Contemporary Art (UniSA, ACSA) to the medium. Currently practicing out of the JamFactory in a tenant studio, Gold works in ceramics, sculpture and installation. 

Gold explores the bodies ontology and poiesis through documenting movement and memory. Utilising clay for its mimetic, metaphorical and therapeutic qualities. This process-oriented work is held together by the indexical trace of gesture, repetition and healing. The works are made with the intention of marking the clay from the body, the body as a tool and the clay as a site to document. The intention in Gold’s work is to speak to the storiness of our lived materiality and view objects as artefacts that are imbued with intimate acts of meaning.  

Gold has exhibited widely, including such galleries as JamFactory, Southwest Contemporary, End Space Gallery, Praxis Artspace, Manly Art Gallery and Museum, Floating Goose Studios, CraftACT, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Most notably they were featured in the 2019 Australian Ceramic Triennial, Hobart, and were recently selected as one of five emerging artists for Primavera, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s annual exhibition of emerging artists living and working in Australia, aged 35 years and under.

Gold has works held in the ArtBank collection, as well as numerous private collections nationwide. They have been the recipient of several awards, grants, and residencies. Selected awards and grants include Australia Council Grant, The Australian Ceramic Council Award (University of South Australia), JamFactory Award, Guildhouse Catapult Mentorship, Helpmann Academy Creative Investment Fund, and George Street Studio Residency.

We congratulate Sam on all of their achievements and are thrilled to be working together in the future.

Congratulations to William Mackinnon who has been selected as a finalist in the prestigious Arthur Guy Memorial Prize with his painting Strive for the light.

Held every two years, the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize attracts some of Australia’s most accomplished artists, awarding a generous acquisitive cash prize of $50,000. The Prize provides Bendigo Art Gallery with the opportunity to survey a breadth of contemporary painting by established and emerging artists from across Australia.

The Prize was initiated by Mr Allen Guy CBE (1917-2007) to honour his brother Arthur Guy (1914-1945) whose life was tragically cut short whilst in military service in New Guinea. Inaugurated in 2003, Bendigo Art Gallery acknowledges all those who have contributed to the success of the Prize and look forward to the continuation of this prestigious and highly regarded acquisitive prize.

The finalists’ exhibition opens at Bendigo Art Gallery on Saturday 20 November, and will be on display until Sunday 13 February, 2022. For more information, visit the Bendigo Art Gallery website.

Congratulations to Justine Varga who has been selected as a finalist in the 2021 Bowness Photography Prize for her chromogenic photographic work Shiaparelli. This work will be featured as part of Justine Varga’s upcoming exhibition ‘Masque’ to be presented at Hugo Michell Gallery in November 2021. 

About the work, Varga says:

“When we look at photographs, we are generally asked to view them as a window onto another place and time. Echoing a famously shocking hue, Schiaparelli ruptures this convention by asking the viewer to simultaneously look through and at its photographicness, and from its centre to its edge. The matrix from which this photograph is derived is a negative on which I have inscribed saliva, urine, bath water, ink and paint, mingled materials of genealogical and historical remembering. This photograph also deliberately draws our attention to its margins, an area of the photograph created during the printing process itself. Refusing to give up any easy meaning, Schiaparelli stages an encounter with the viewer, an experience as much as a document.”

Over the last 16 years, the Bowness Photography Prize has emerged as an important annual survey of contemporary photographic practice in Australia and one of the most prestigious prizes in the country. The winning work will be awarded $30,000 and will be acquired into Monash Gallery of Art’s nationally significant collection of Australian photographs.

The exhibition will be on display from Thursday 9^th of September until 7^th November at the Monash Gallery of Art.

Hugo Michell Gallery invites you to the exhibitions ‘Low Pressure System’, a collaborative exhibition by James Dodd & Henry Jock Walker, and ‘Specks’ by Sera Waters. These exhibitions are presented as part of the 2021 SALA Festival.

*Please note*
-Due to the current government restrictions we are unable to serve refreshments at this exhibition opening and you are required to wear a mask.
-If you wish to join us for the opening of these exhibitions, RSVP is essential to mail@hugomichellgallery.com

‘Low Pressure System’ by James Dodd & Henry Jock Walker brings together a collection of ongoing investigations and will include a new teamwork exploration.  Whilst having shared many art adventures together, this will be the first duo exhibition for the pair. This exhibition plays out the affinitive connection that both Dodd and Walker have for painting, colour and abstraction.

Whilst the works of each artist show strong visual correlations; their individual approaches, processes and materials are embedded with varied content.  Dodd continues his investigations into the use of mechanical devices such as painting tools and industrial processes and Walker continues his sew collage of pre-loved wetsuits.

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‘Specks’, by Sera Waters presents a body of work that were made during a time of the pandemic, lockdowns, grief, and grappling with growing climactic disasters. Sera has sensitively communicated these themes through laboured methods allowing time for her own and audience reflection.

“I imagine the atmosphere of now is full of specks; specks of the past, specks of data, specks of living matter, specks of stuff. Specks link to others to make threads, then tangles, then whole interconnected networks, that are the basis of the stories and material worlds we inherit and continue to create for the next generations. These artworks were made during the time of the pandemic, lockdowns, my own grief, and my grappling with growing climatic disasters. They transform specks of data, family histories, found materials, and textile traditions into tales, reminders, and laborious reckonings. These stories of stumps, drought-ridden land, extreme heat, and invasive species all arise from past entangles; from a want for wood, from a stowaway pest, from traditions introduced ill-fittingly to another’s faraway land. Tracing these tangles, following their threads, is a way of learning from them, redirecting their accumulated specks into new stories for the future.”

Exhibition runs from: 3 August – 28 August
Official Exhibition opening: Thursday 5 August 6-8 pm
Exhibition Finissage: Saturday 28th August

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.