THE TAKEN PATH OPENS FEBRUARY 12TH 2025

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!

The Taken Path is a durational project made In collaboration with Ian Gibbins. The project was seeded in 2023, when I was invited to particpate in A Partnership for Uncertain Times. This work, a video series has been developed for exhibition at the Wall Gallery, Carrick Hill at the invitation of the 2025 Adelaide Festival. It features six digital screens and an immersive soundscape that will place you inside our experiences of walking this extraordinary path through many altered landscapes across the seasons. Click here for some comprehensive background and current information. Taken Path Info

It has been an immense challenge and a pleasure to create The Taken Path.

Together we’ve learnt a great deal about vision during this project, all the while focusing on a compelling set of rules that set our gaze front and centre.

Our awareness of the periphery has taught us surprising lessons.

For it is, in fact, what lay outside the plan, the places where the questions continue to pull and tug, that holds the most fertile ground; the fleeting, darting, unfocused blurs, much of which goes by unnoticed, living and dying in vivid cycles, interwoven in a parallel universe.

We are not at the centre of everything in existence. We are not the reason nor the solution, but we are here at the same time. We do not exist in isolation.

We are colour-blind at the edges until we change direction.

Catherine Truman and Ian Gibbins January 2025

The exhibition opens to the public February 12th. The Wall Gallery is on the second floor of Carrick Hill House Museum. An entry ticket will get you into the fascinating manor house and the Wall Gallery. See the Adelaide Festival AF and Carrick Hill CH Websites for details. Ian and I will be in conversation with Susan McCormack the director of Carrick Hill, in the magnificent main hall of the house on March 13th, 6pm. Join us for some insights into this fascinating project. Book you tickets through the Carrick Hill Website

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