Tamara Elkins

A video portrait of the artist shot in candlelight, she places her hand against her cheek, feeling the bones and then letting her hand drop away. With this video we see a text referring to an encounter between the artist and her grandmother. While visiting, she found her grandmother to have very dry skin, and so decided to apply moisturiser. The sensation of tenderly applying this salve brought about a feeling of uncanny sameness: touching her grandmother’s face felt like touching her own.

The gesture captured in the video is enveloped by a large blanket of hand-felted wool, a reference to both the protection offered by motherly care and the tacit knowledge of working with textiles that was passed down to the artist through their matrilineal line. 

The recent practice of Tamara Elkins has been focused on what is inherited through her matrilineal line. Having begun the project by looking through the family photographic archive, the artist realised how similar in appearance and gesture she, her mother and grandmother all were. Coming to see each generation as an iteration of the last.

Viewing these photographs along with the sense memory of acts of care, create moments of bodily dislocation from the present moment: an intergenerational time travel brought about by accessing visual and embodied archives. For the artist this brings comfort, it creates a sense of being connected to something larger than herself.

In Kit's on River Road/Fairway 9 a voice over of the artist mother leads her in performing a prayer. The artist uses incense to make offerings to the spirits and owners of the land and any other wandering spirits. This is a prayer made in the Narapiromkwan Foo household and more importantly at the family-run Thai restaurant the artist remembers from her childhood. The family-run restaurant is a potent childhood memory and was instrumental in forming many of the artists value systems.

 Sitting atop a locker, the placement is reminiscent of the TV that would sit in the kitchen of her family’s restaurant. Placed alongside this video is a replica of the incense used in the prayer offering, incense that has been scented by the artist using spices commonly found in Thai Cuisine, garlic, lemongrass, galangal, chilli, and coriander.

The smell of the incense permeates the room and is designed to both recall the scents of the restaurant and to invade your olfactory senses. With the artists interest in boundaries and thresholds, particularly in relation to how culture spreads and mixes within a diaspora, the act of the incense overwhelming your senses is the perfect metaphor as it spreads and mixes with the air, crossing the boundary of the viewer’s body.

Nic’s practice speaks to oral histories, learning through ritual, and the complexities of language. Kit's on River Road/Fairway 9 is a living archive of the artists memory and a haunting by a restaurant no longer there.

In this split screen film, we see to the left, home video footage of the artist’s mother, to the right, the artist herself re-enacting the same scenes. Filmed by Tessa Muskett at the same age her mother was from the original footage it poetically compares similarities and differences of the lives of mother and daughter. The sound to this work is a recorded conversation between mother and daughter, commenting and comparing how they view each other, defining themselves in relation to one another.

There are many imperfections within the imitation of her mother which the artist has intentionally left in. Slippages of scene where a hand moves at the wrong time, framing that doesn’t quite match the original footage, scenes of birthday’s which should have children, but which instead include the artists friends. These slippages enhance the difference between the two lives, there is a kind of anticipation of them matching, a game of spot the difference. 

A work that sits outside of the artist wider practice, this work was generated out of the knowledge that the artist’s mother would soon pass away. It stands as an archive not only of their experience in viewing each other, seeing themselves mirrored or differing but also as a tangible recording of the voice and visage of a grieved loved one.

Whenever the artist forms new significant relationships she shares this film. It acts as a way of bonding, of sharing this person who they can never meet but who has played a vital role in the artists life.

The hands of the artists mother fill the frame of How to Peel a Pomegranate, working to extract pomegranate seeds. An accompanying voice over tells the viewer the best technique for extracting the seeds and that one pomegranate seed can cure one thousand illnesses.

This familial scene of knowledge being passed from one generation to the next highlights the artists interest in inherited knowledge surrounding health and medicine. Sehej Kaur’s practice speaks to the tensions between cultural traditions of care and western medical practices. Her work is particularly focused on how this plays out when living within a diasporic community.

 Emulating a shrine, the work How to Peel a Pomegranate sits close to the floor, surrounded by garlands. As the viewer you must lower yourself to the delineated space in order to view it. This act from the viewer further enhances the questioning of western expectations. That there are many ways to view and to approach the gaining of wisdom.

Using media as a form of archival exploration Sehej Kaur presents the viewer with a work that not only speaks of the way care and knowledge is passed on but actively gives that care and knowledge to the audience as they view it.

Part of an ongoing installation that expands and contracts Abby Marie Murray’s works are assembled from painted canvas, textiles and wire forms. Haunted (The Lake) sits close to the ground and is constructed from multiple blue textiles, painted canvas and wire. In using this patchwork of blues, she alludes to how many fragmented memories of home can morph and converge into a single idea or representation of a place. The Spiral is an idea of infinity hangs from the ceiling, in this work eye’s dangle from a spiral structure. Each one representing a remembered version of a family member. Finally, in the window we have I imagined that this was home but it feels like a memory, a two sided work depicting a double narrative. Towards the street we have the pleasant exterior of a face filled with wonder while towards the gallery we have the darker undertone of fractured stories and unrecognisable faces.

These three works are part of a larger ongoing body of work where the artist is unravelling her familial memories and mythologies. The artist forms and then reforms her installations. Changing details by stitching or painting over. She uses wire, a malleable material to hang and shape the works in new configurations. This process is both a method of working and directly refers to the process of forming and reforming her own memories.

The artist speaks of having inherited origins with missing, un-taught knowledge. Looking to inherited fragments of images, clothing and quilts to piece together that missing knowledge. She questions whether these possessions give her true insight into the past and grapples with the responsibility of caretaker.

Employing Magical Realism as a stylistic technique, the artist sees the genre as a defiant act for those left out of the archive. It allows for a kaleidoscope of multiple worlds, of undulating historical truths and residual fragments.

 In these works, Abby is creating a new archive, they portray her undoing and becoming as she connects deeper to her inheritance.

Instal view, artists left to right, Mart Basa, Tessa Muskett, Liam Anastasi and Hannah Mckellar

Michael Elkins, Cathedral, 2024, Inkjet Pigment Print and plants (from grandmother’s collection)

Michael Elkins, Cathedral, 2024, Inkjet Pigment Print and plants (from grandmother’s collection)

This body of work is a portrait of a garden that seemed to become intertwined with its gardener.  

 For sixty-six or her one hundred years my grandmother tended her garden with the same devotion with which she attended church.

Wild and ever-changing, some plants became defining features, but nasturtiums and roses were celebrated equally with the weeds. In her garden everything seemed to grow, plants half-dead were resurrected, cuttings stolen from strangers thrived. 

These plants have become symbolic of her life, and a memory for those who knew her of the many hours spent amongst them. 

Mart Basa

Hendrietta Praying, 2020, Acrylic on canvas

Hendrietta after her first retirement, 2015, Marker ink on paper

 Hendrietta, 2023, Oil on canvas

 Hendrietta on the sofa, 2024, Oil on board

Mama sleeping on a rainy Sunday, 2003, Pen ink on postcard 

Hendrietta Sleeping (in pink), 2024, Oil on canvas 

Hendrietta on the phone, 2020, Acrylic on canvas

Tessa Muskett

All The Love I've Received (Handwritten), 2024, Paper cut outs, white vinyl contact paper and pins

Hannah McKellar 

Shield: It All Stops, 2019, Natural and Synthetic fibres on Linen

Shield: The Sun, 2020-24, Natural and Synthetic fibres on Linen

Suzanne Claridge

Matrilineage, 2020, Ink on paper

 it is written (in your hands, on a kodak), (1998) 2024, Photograph from the artist’s personal archive

 A Portal and a Promise, 2021, Ink on paper

Liam Anastasi

Fragments of you pierce all of me, 2024, Handwritten poems on paper with Chai stains, Mother’s Sari

Tamara Elkins

Memory of a memory, 2024, Soap (from grandmother’s collection)

Instal view, artists left to right, Tessa Muskett, Liam Anastasi, Tamara Elkins, Hannah Mckellar, Suzanne Claridge