LAUREN BRINCAT / When do I breathe?

1 March 2025 – 25 May 2025
Opening event: Friday 28 February 2025

When do I breathe? by artist Lauren Brincat is the first exhibition inspired by the 2024 public performance of the same title by the artist, which shaped new paths through the streets of Sydney, connecting communities in collaborative action. In March 2025, as the first exhibition of 2025, The Lock-Up, Muloobinba/Newcastle will present the film, fabric sculptures, and sound installation of the performance—making the presentation a performative structure and whole-of-exhibition experience.

The exhibition and titular film work, When do I breathe? is inspired by the in-between breaths of the choir, whose composition reflects these sounds, sighs, pauses, breaks, rests, and moments of gathering and anticipation before action.

When do I breathe? was the result of a year-long engagement with local Randwick communities by the artist, including local dancers, the NSW Collegium Musicum Choir and NIDA students and alumni, offering an artistic response to the value of care in our society. The performance and resulting film presented at The Lock-Up explores a collective artistic action as a form of resistance, and the work aims to empower the community to come together and reclaim public space. Timed at the intersection between the end of a working day and the beginning of a working night, it brings together local communities that are often separated by different shifts and daily rhythms.

In gallery, audiences will see and hear movement and song animated by a series of fabric sculptures originally used in the performance—what the artist calls graphic scores—including a 100m, handwoven cotton gauze, providing a connective temporal thread between the performers of the film, the audiences of The Lock-Up and the broader community. These graphic scores are revisited for The Lock-Up, featuring elements inspired by forms of nonverbal communication, such as silk tell-tales—to mark the way the wind blows—or knot tying—an ancient form of storing information.

This project was originally funded by Transport for NSW’s Safer Cities program, which is investing $30 million over two years to help improve perceptions of safety in our cities and towns, particularly for women, girls, and gender diverse people.

Proudly funded by the NSW Government in association with Transport for NSW and Create NSW.

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LOCUST JONES / The green dream

1 March 2025 – 25 May 2025
Opening event: Friday 28 February 2025

Nationally recognised contemporary artist Locust Jones presents The green dream at The Lock-Up in 2025 — an exhibition surveying the artist’s intimate and internal lens through which he has interpreted the political throughout his distinguished career, to capture the tension between global events and the immediate, tangible realities of daily life.

Diaristic drawings, rendered in ink on paper, entangle fragments of world news with reflections on the artist’s personal—and tumultuous—lived experiences, offering a raw, unfiltered experience of how the contemporary chaos of the infosphere, or hypermodernity, intersect with psychological experience. Each work is product of a moment in time, layered with the immediacy of his chosen material to reflect both permanence and fragility.

Accompanying the artist’s works on paper are skull-like ceramic sculptures, seemingly carbonised personages in a deep charcoal hue; for the artist, they offer a visceral confrontation with mortality and the enduring weight of human history. These haunting forms both ground and guide the dreamlike experience of the exhibition, serving as reminders of the corporeal and the inevitable. Wandering through both small to monumental scale drawing, large paintings in acrylic and oil suspended strikingly in the former Exercise Yard, the titular work awaits audiences: The green dream, 2025.

Descending into the oneiric haze of one of The Lock-Up’s historic cells, The green dream unravels the internal landscape through which the artist interprets and makes his grim auguries on paper, canvas, sculpture and film. The surreal, forest like enclosure sets the atmospheric tone alongside the old male lockup cell in which it is located: infusing the work with the heady claustrophobia of a nightmare, echoing the constraints of social structures and personal introspection.

The green dream invites viewers to wander through this interplay of thought and artefact, grappling with the fluid boundary between the public and the private, the ephemeral and the eternal.