Join the artists from Pattern Recognition at Canberra Contemporary Art Space and hear them talk about their work in this exhibition.  Followed by the official exhibition opening and performance by vocalist Shikara Ringdahl in collaboration with exhibiting artist Hannah Quinlivan

Pattern Recognition celebrates female and non-binary artists from the ACT region who use abstraction and design principles to explore colour perception and spatial relationships. The exhibition investigates regeneration, exploring the influence of traditional craft disciplines on contemporary art practice.

The Pattern Recognition exhibition launch will feature a performance by vocalist Shikara Ringdahl in collaboration with exhibiting artist Hannah Quinlivan. Ringdahl will interact both physically and vocally with Quinlivan’s experiential artworks, exploring how our collective emotional responses to social and environmental issues are shared, transmitted, and transformed.

Artists’ Biographies

Ngaio Fitzpatrick 

Ngaio Fitzpatrick is an artist, Honorary Lecturer with the ANU Institute of Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions, Affiliate with the ANU History and Legacies of Environmental Violence cross-campus network and recipient of both a 2018 Australia Awards Endeavour Fellowship in Berlin and a 2016 ANU Vice Chancellors College of the Arts Fellowship. With a background in sustainable architecture and building, her multi-disciplinary arts practice encompasses site-specific installation, performance, moving image and at times, collaborative experimental music interactions. Her works explore the human relationship with the existential threat posed by escalating and disruptive climate change. Ngaio’s practice recycles and repurposes industrial waste materials, endeavors to minimise embodied energy and engages the viewer by creating immersive environments. 

Liz Coats 

Liz Coats has exhibited consistently since the 1970s and is held in major collections across Australia.  Liz has devoted her career to exploring colour in abstraction as an embodied, material practice, bringing organic and formal issues into relationship. Painting in series and relying on grid formations as a substrate, colour has remained her central focus, in particular how it mediates her preoccupations with dimensional insight, transition and connectedness.   Her process entails subtle layering of translucent colour, at times inspired by natural patterns and forms, always responding and adapting to interferences and irregularities as they occur, looking for colour interactions that are alive to her vision.

Al Munro 

Al Munro is Canberra-based artist whose interests span painting and drawing-based practices. Her art practice and research draw on diverse fields including artistic abstraction, geometry and textile patterning to explore the relationships between visual art, craft and design. Al has exhibited widely throughout Australia and internationally, and her work is held in public and private collections. 

Hannah Quinlivan 

Hannah Quinlivan’s drawing practice materialises structures of feeling, spanning multiple media and materials. Her work examines how the affective atmospheres of our time are shared, transmitted, and transmuted, focusing on collective emotional responses to social and environmental situations. This exploration finds material expression in her contemporary drawings. Quinlivan has shown her work in numerous international solo and group exhibitions, including the MINIARTEXTIL survey of contemporary textile art in Como, Italy (2019), and Paris, France (2020). Her public artworks are permanently installed in Canberra, Brisbane, and Sydney. Quinlivan is represented by Curatorial+Co in Sydney and Flinders Lane Gallery in Melbourne.

Kirsten Farrell

Kirsten Farrell is a queer multidisciplinary artist who attended the ANU School of Art and continues to live on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri land. Kirsten grew up at Bomaderry in New South Wales Dharawal, Wodi Wodi and Yuin country. Her practice includes object-based installation, textiles, performance and painting.

Emma Rani Hodges

Emma Rani Hodges’s practice explores community building, migration and multiethnic identity. They do this through mixed media textile installations and acts of storytelling. Fluctuating between image, text and object Hodges’s work resists easy categorisation. They use ambiguous materiality to examine social boundaries, and to explore feelings of ‘otherness’.

Image | Hannah Quinlivan | Subaqueous, Detail 2024 | courtesy of the artist