groundwork
A Collaboration with Saskia Van Pagee Anderson
commissioned for the touring exhibition
All that is alive
16 Sept - 12 Dec 2025 at UTS Gallery Sydney
25 Feb - 10 May 2026 at La Trobe Art Institue Bendigo
Participating artists: Tully Arnot, Sonja Carmichael and Elisa Jane Carmichael, Madeleine Collies, Other Matter
Sarah Poulgrain, Mandy Quadrip, Keg de Souza, Magnetic Topographies and Ivey Wawn
Curatorium: Amelia Wallin, Jacqui Shelton, Stella Rosa McDonald, Connie Anthes
Groundwork was supported by Creative Victoria’s Creative Projects Fund
Photography by Leon Schoots, AJ Taylor and Jacquie Manning
An iterative touring exhibition co-commissioned by UTS Gallery & Art Collection and La Trobe Art Institute, All That is Alive brings together twelve Australian artists and collectives working with living systems.
Drawing on ancient kinships and ancestral knowledge, mycelial intelligence and fermentation, non-hierarchical and interspecies relations, machine desire and collective agency, the artworks in the exhibition engage with the interconnected practices that sustain and define life—human and otherwise.
All That is Alive brings together diverse practices to reflect on life in its many forms, evoking the entangled relations that sustain us and imagining new ways of living together.
2025 UTS Gallery exhibiton pictured below
Groundwork is a collaborative artwork made with emerging artist Saskia Van Pagee Anderson. Conceived of as an immersive soft sculpture garden, the work celebrates sustained research into plant dyed textiles and vegetal forms and revolves around a shared attentivness to the enigmatic world of plants. Working together as settlers on Djaara Country the lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung, this installation emerged from a process of collaborative intergenerational practice-led research made in response to place and the vegetal beings we co-habitat with.
Shaped by the unfolding of lively material relationality, the work invites gallery visitors into a space of sensuous texture and colour, much like a garden - a world of tactile visual play. Groundwork explores the wonder that arises through purposefully turning our attention to the world of plants and questions what we might learn from them about other ways of living and learning.
2026 La Trobe Art Institute exhibition pictured below
