Cate Consandine: Still Point / Turning World

Cate Consandine: still point/turning world, the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery, comprises ambitious new sculptural works together with a presentation of her major video work Cut Colony.

Consandine’s new sculptural works respond to an early piece of 19th century Australiana, the Macquarie collector’s chest (c.1817–18), held by the Mitchell Library at the State Library of New South Wales. The artwork on the chest depicts colonial Newcastle and the surrounding areas and is thought to be the work of Joseph Lycett – a convict artist of the period. Whilst the reasons for creating the chest, its purpose, as well as the identities of the artists and craftsmen responsible remain elusive – like Consandine’s enigmatic and uncanny sculptural forms – mystery is an inherent part of the allure.

Consandine’s video work Cut Colony (2012), first presented at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2012, depicts staged performances filmed in remote New South Wales that unfold to explore the relationships between subject and landscape from a postcolonial perspective. Her work seeks to locate experience between stillness and movement, or the place where desire is posited – the edge of movement – andparticularly fixes on the liminal body; a body on edge in the landscape.