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Catherine Truman

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L to R Julie Ewington, Jess Dare, Lisa Fruno, Anne Brennan, Catherine Truman, Sue Lorraine, Rachel Harris, May 2025

BEAUTIFUL TENSIONS: GRAY STREET WORKSHOP CELEBRATES FORTY YEARS

Our opening on May 8th 2025 at the Jamfactory was a triumph! Huge thanks to all the folks at the Jamfactory! Thanks to Julie Ewington, long-time friend of GSW, for opening the show. We have a special community here in South Australia; a generous, supportive, diverse and loving bunch of creatives. Thanks so much for coming out and being there in person to celebrate the past forty years of Gray Street Workshop and launch our new work! What a crowd!

This mammoth exhibition is essentailly four solo exhibitions rolled into one. Four substantial bodies of new work by each of the current partners of Gray Street; Sue Lorraine, Jess Dare, Lisa Furno and myself. You’ll need a packed lunch to take it all in when you visit. It finishes up at the Jamfactory Adelaide on July 6th and then begins on a three year nationwide tour, supported by Visions Australia. I’ll keep you posted on Instagram!

There is a beautiful book Beautiful Tensions: Gray Street Workshop celebrates forty years written by Anne Brennan, designed by Rachel Harris and published by Wakefield Press. It’s so beautifully illustrated and gives intimate insight into the heart of the workshop, its history and especially into the evolution of the actual creative development of the works in the show. WONDERFUL !!!! You can get you hands on a copy through the Jamfactory shop!

Thanks also to Create SA and Creative Australia for supporting the development of this special project.

It’s 2025

Some how I blinked and 2025 snuck in with barely a sound.

During 2024, I re-presented The Arrangements: assembling nature in a solo exhibition at Funaki Gallery in Melbourne and titled it The Rearrangements. It was an opportunity for me to re-contextualise the work within a contemporary domestic setting of a salon-style apartment/gallery. The original body of work was made during 2022/ 2023 in response to a year-long residency at Carrick Hill, an English style manor house and formal garden nestled in the Adelaide foothills. I examined plant /human relationships largely through a post-colonial lens.

Many compelling themes arose from the research influenced by the schism between the highly managed formal garden and the remnant endemic bushland that rims the site. Over time, I became acutely aware of the compelling tensions between them and put very simply, the ways we seem to intervene in and ‘bend’ nature to suit our needs. Not a square centimetre remains untouched.

So many struggles of conscience arose; where does our understanding of ‘natural’ and cultivated landscape, conservation, preservation, management and ‘ownership’ originate? Why is there such scant documentation of pre-colonial history? These questions are ever-expanding.

The works were a direct response to these conundrums. They are an interweaving of old and new threads, definitely not meant as answers or solutions.

2024 was also an intense and extraordinary year on making. I came to know the value of making from the heart, renew my vows in a way to this primal drive.

I will always examine my life and art practice through a maker’s lens. This way of seeing and being in the world has gained such personal gravity in recent years. The movement it creates enables a better connection to core imperatives- including listening to, learning about and caring for the land I occupy. One step at a time, and thinking beyond my own lifespan.

There is no actual gap ever in arts practice; life pours in and out everyday, it’s a continuum. 

Gray Street Workshop turns forty in 2025 and we are celebrating. In April ‘Beautiful Tensions’, an exhibition of the work of the four current partners will open at the JamFactory and go on to tour nationally for the next three years. We have all made significant bodies of work that will come together in one space. Along the way we have gathered each week to share in our process and progress. It is an incredible experience to mentor and be mentored by your closest colleagues. The Jamfactory Adelaide is playing host . There will be a most beautiful, quirky, enlightening book written by Anne Brennan and designed by Rachel Harris of Bit Scribbly Design. And there will be a movie and and and and!!!! Cant wait!

The show opens to the public April 22nd in the main gallery of the Jamfactory. I hope you all get a chance to join us for all the celebrations. The official opening is on May 8th with the book launch and artist talk on the May 10th.

Forty years! Hey! Still vital, still absolutely committed to practice, still learning, still making!

 

July 13th 2023 A Partnership for Uncertain Times: Art, Science and Technology

July 13, 2023

The last twelve months have been extraordinarily productive. Over 2022/23 I have also been involved in another fine project, A Partnership for Uncertain Times.

Media Release

A Partnership for Uncertain Times features four exceptional South Australian artists working at the intersections of art, science & technology:

BRAD DARKSON, DEIRDRE FEENEY, NIKI SPEROU & CATHERINE TRUMAN

The project features a workshop, an exhibition, artist talks as well as text and video essays.

Artists working with science and technology constantly grapple with uncertainty during and through their processes of creating. A Partnership for Uncertain Times offers a rare opportunity for the commissioned artists to take a deep dive into exploratory process over a 12-month period. The post-pandemic timeframe when uncertainty was a constant.

The project focuses on process and creative inquiry, placing emphasis on courageous experimental development over ‘perfecting’ finished artworks.

This Arts South Australia funded collaboration between the University of South Australia (UniSA) and ANAT (Australian Network for Art and Technology), lifts the curtain of cross-disciplinary practice revealing insight into cross-disciplinary artistic process.

Co-developed by Dr Deirdre Feeney (UniSA) and ANAT, the project launched with an in-person student-focused workshop on 22 October, 2022 at UniSA.

The Taken Path: a durational project

August 2022 – July 2023

Catherine Truman in collaboration with Ian Gibbins

I worked in collaboration with Ian Gibbins on a durational project titled The Taken Path, also based at Carrick Hill.

The Taken Path is an open-ended experiment in observation and embodied experience. The project revolves around the repetitive action of walking and filming a defined path that traverses both the cultivated and uncultivated landscape of the Carrick Hill estate.

Each month, over the past year, Ian and I randomly chose a day and time to film using two main devices; a video camera and an iPhone.

We walked the centre of path in both directions, holding the devices the same way each time, filming whatever conditions were present on that day. This repetitive action created the control films and the raw material for experimental footage and stills.

I chose Carrick Hill because of my familiarity with this estate. It is a vast conundrum of shifting, delicate connections between humans and the greater environment. It is a vast estate where pure fantasy and the hard reality of both ancient and present life can be encountered at once. It is like a microcosm of the wider world.

There seems to be an innate drive in us to intervene in, alter and reorder the natural environments around us, even if we have no place in them.

If we keep to the path already taken what will happen to our powers of observation?

If we walk it many times does our awareness shift or is it be-calmed?

Can we learn anew from this repetition?

This has been such a generative process. Our films shown side by side on the same screen map the intricate shifts that occur across a range of landscapes, cultivated and less structured over the course of a year. Working in this open-ended way has meant we have a bounty of raw material for future work.

 

Glass Gloves- the separation

Amongst the flood of themes we are investigating is a phenomenon we both felt whilst filming over the year. Our devices seemed to separate us from the very environment we were trying to document. Both of us felt that our experience was mediated through the screens we held. I have begun experimenting with glass glove forms that are heavy and dislocating to wear, I am in the one in the glass vitrine, not able to extend my touch to decipher the very environment I seek to understand. They are like miniature wearable bio-spheres and as I move, and expend precious energy, they collect my fluid.

The slow and unexpected unfolding has been deeply satisfying and staying open to the process, constantly reviewing it, discussing It with others, has made me realise that here is where the real work lies- stepping back more, getting out of the way, not filling the gaps with solutions, allowing direct experience and actions to lead my creative responses.

The relationships established across creative arts and scientific fields, as a result of projects such as this are important and rare. They are the catalyst for dialogue that tests the boundaries of language and our understanding and representation of held and new frontiers of knowledge about the natural world we share.

More about The Taken Path

https://www.iangibbins.com.au/2023/06/22/the-taken-path-a-durational-project-with-catherine-truman/

ANAT links to films and catalogue A Partnership for Uncertain Times

https://www.anat.org.au/program/a-partnership-for-uncertain-times/

https://issuu.com/marchellematthew/docs/a-partnership-for-uncertain-times

Artlink article link

https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/5096/a-partnership-for-uncertain-times-art-science-and-/

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