Ancient Waters: Trans-disciplinary Space

Phil Edwards, Clinton Cahill, Peter Clarke and Augusta Zeeng are joined by curator/artist Dr Colleen Morris in this annual, multi-disciplinary exhibition. Morris’ practice focuses on waterways and the four artists chosen to join her in this exploration share her collaborative philosophy in relation to land, environment and ecological issues. Morris has exhibited regularly in solo and group exhibitions in Australia and been represented in several international exhibitions, with an art practice encompassing eco-art installation and sound. ANCIENT WATERS: TRANSDISCIPLINARY SPACE is the latest in a regular series of works from artists enthused and informed by collaboration and a mutual, elemental theme. Cahill's ‘Refuge’ and ‘Outrig’ are obliquely and accidentally topical whilst alluding to a continuous state of affairs. They also, obliquely and accidentally, relate to each other without being paired. Both are motivated by a sense of the oceanic not as a body of water, but as something equally vast that is set against the contingency and frailty of human structures, including institutions and imaginative projections. It is before this sense of the oceanic that dream and ambition become truly profound. The very fragility of our bootstrapped gimcrack constructions, as irrational bas they are necessary, is the paradoxical trick of their endurance. They endure because of not despite this essential quality. It seems to me that art is often made in this way, and for these reasons.