I’m very excited that my drawing video, Entropy: Lessons from the Sea, has been selected by Scott Elliot, Assistant Curator, Australian Art, Art Gallery of NSW, for inclusion in the 2026 Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing. Congratulations to all the artists who keep drawing alive and thank you to the donors and organisers who make this prize possible.
1-30 September 2024
The Pale Carrier, 2023. Photo: Brenda Factor.
In September I’ll be undertaking a one-month residency at the Fremantle Arts Centre to focus on The Repatriation Project: Rituals For Letting Go.
The Repatriation Project: Rituals for Letting Go, is an ongoing project where a large seashell collection that began in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the 1970s, is reimagined into a series of artworks, actions, and exhibitions before being returned to their culture or place of origin. The project explores materiality, memory, place, value, beauty, desire, symbolism, and the ethics of collecting from nature. The project reflects the broader issues of repatriation facing museums and collections around the world and seeks alternative forms of engagement with objects or lifeforms we might otherwise be tempted to collect.
The Pale Carrier Above the Sea of Fog, 2024, was selected as a finalist in the Goulburn Art Award 2024. Exhibition Catalogue
Sally Clarke, The Pale Carrier Above the Sea of Fog, 2024, acrylic paint on vinyl, 100 x 74cm. Photo: Sally Clarke.
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Surface Tension, an exhibition with Brenda Factor, at ANCA Gallery in Canberra from 15 May to 2 June 2024, marks the beginning of a project to return a seashell collection and other artefacts to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. The artefacts, purchased in the 1970s from the Cocos Malay people, include sea turtle shell brooches and bangles, some small wood carvings, and an ornamental walking stick made from a shark’s spine. They will be donated to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands museum.
The exhibition will be followed by a residency at Freemantle Arts Centre in September 2024.
Surface Tension
Sally Clarke and Brenda Factor
ANCA Gallery Canberra/Kamberri 15 May – 2 June 2024
Artists Talks Saturday 1 June 2-3pm
This exhibition contains paintings, moving images, sculptures, noisy shells, a phallic (I) eye, and vitreous enamel surfaces. It responds to a seashell collection that began in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, which has remain packaged and ethically and emotionally complex for over 40 years. The exhibition connects ideas around materiality, memory, place, beauty, value, desire, abstraction, and symbolism.
ANCA Gallery 1 Rosevear Place Dickson ACT. Opening hours Wed to Sun 12-5pm
The artists acknowledge the people of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri language groups as the traditional owners of lands extending throughout the ACT and surrounding regions. We pay our deepest respects to Elders past, present and future, and recognise their community’s continuous connection to Countrycfor over 60,000 years. We applaud the ACT government’s steps toward healing and Treaty.
Images: Left and right: Brenda Factor, vitreous enamel brooch (detail), 2024. Centre: Sally Clarke, The Pale Carrier, 2022, acrylic on vinyl. Photos: Sally Clarke
I’m very excited to share that I am a finalist in the 2023 Dobell Drawing Prize. The Dobell is an unparalleled celebration of drawing technique and innovation. Presented by the National Art School in partnership with the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation, the biennial prize explores the enduring importance of drawing within contemporary art practice. My work, Seven Variations on an Acorn (2022), grew out of the Forest Bathing project curated by Fiona Hooton of Canberra’s Localjinni for the 2022 Canberra Art Biennial, and engages with the visual language of expanded drawing. The exhibition opens on Thursday 30 March 2023 and runs until 10 June 2023 at NAS Gallery, Darlinghurst.
Photo: Hamish Ta-mé
My short video, Forest Incantations, will be shown as part of a Forest Bathing Night Walk organised by Fiona Hooton of Canberra’s Localjinni. The event is part of the Canberra Art Biennial 2022 and will take place in the National Arboretum’s cork forest. Other artists involved in the event, including Fiona, are Tracey M Benson, Jane Duong, Caroline Huf and Nicole Voevodin-Cash. More details here
Sally Clarke, Forest Incantations, 2022, video still (3.34)
