Quiet Objects: Hannah Hall

15-30 June 2023 | G1

https://ladderartspace.com.au/exhibitions/quiet-objects-hannah-hall/

This exhibition by Naarm based artist Hannah Hall, is an investigation of materiality and juxtaposition between two- and three-dimensional forms. With an artistic practice acting as a continuous cycle of making, each work is approached with curiosity and play. Working across multiple mediums of painting, textiles and ceramics, each avenue of material becomes linked by gesture, traces of the hand manifesting themselves in similar ways between forms. Not only through paint, but the gesture of stitching, folding, and sculpting. Everything has been created by hand, from the stitching, to dying of fabrics and hand-building of ceramic sculptures. Creases in fabric or fingerprints in clay, these traces left behind by the artists hands emphasise the closeness between artist and object. The result is a small intimate body of work caught in a space between solid and soft, transparent and opaque, flat and sculptural.

Paper Hero: Zela Bissett

14-30 June 2023 | G2

https://ladderartspace.com.au/exhibitions/paper-hero-zela-bissett/

Zela Bissett’s exhibition, Paper Hero, is aptly named because the paper itself is the hero of the artworks. These are no ordinary papers but sheets of specialised substance formed by the artist from plants and earths gathered from her subtropical garden. The various plants give colour, texture and character to the papers formed from them. Zela uses banana trunks, ginger stalks, arrowroot, okra, aloe vera and many other plants to achieve a variety of effects in her unique artworks, of which paper is indeed the hero, sometimes complemented by inks which Zela also makes from first-principles. She brews and strains berries, flowers or bark to get different shades and tones. Embedded within the paper are fronds, fragments and tendrils of the plants which were used to make the papers. Zela works within the offerings of nature, finding much to explore and making artworks whose subtle beauty reflects the natural materials from which they are composed.