Never keep both feet on the ground: Andrea Eckersley, Aylsa McHugh, Veronica Kent, Elena Misso, Ezz Monem, Mardi Nowak, Jake Preval, Sally Smart, David Hugh Thomas

Never keep both feet on the ground brings together nine Melbourne-based artists whose works engage with expanded collage and assemblage. The exhibition is titled after a work by the German Dada artist Hannah Höch; best known as a pioneer of photomontage and one of the first artists to engage with and understand the potency of images in the printed mass media. Höch's role working for the German publishing house Ullstein Verlag provided her with unfettered access to magazines and newspapers, which she cut up and reassembled, drawing on her understanding of cinematic techniques, to both comment on and critique contemporary events and the social construction of gender roles.

While a number of the artists featured in Never keep both feet on the ground engage explicitly with the assemblage techniques favoured by Höch – including her interest in reassembling bodies to unsettling affect – others use strategies of erasure, folding, and layering in their construction of works that celebrate how an image loosened from its original moorings and set adrift can reveal new truths.

Andrea Eckersley’s photographic works explore an interest in the activation of surfaces and the role of the artist in noticing the ways surfaces feature in our everyday encounters, shaping them in particular ways. This concern for the activation of surfaces presents a means of interrogating the affective and embodied experience of place, identity and community. Eckersley has sourced historical parish maps from the State Library of Victoria, which have been scanned then folded into intricate origami-like forms and rephotographed. These formal works comment on the process in which land in Naarm/Melbourne was fraudulently claimed, surveyed, mapped, subdivided and sold off to settler colonists.

Veronica Kent's practice incorporates painting, photography, installation and collage to explore narratives and portraits of imaginary characters engaged in moments of wonder and intimacy. With a particular focus on mythologies of connection and love, she is interested in how these abstract ideas might be expressed and filtered through a lens of feminine desire.

Elena Misso works primarily with analogue photography, projection and the colour darkroom to produce photographic works that explore the metaphorical terrain between the unconscious mind and the natural world. Utilising a hitherto unexplored part of the gallery, Misso’s installation reframes, reassembles, and transposes images into more images.

Aylsa McHugh's collage centred practice draws from a wide range of influences including feminism, film and psychology. She is interested in how the re-contextualising and combining of found imagery can lend itself to new and divergent interpretations. Her work also explores the innate tendency of human psychology to seek out connections, patterns and familiarity. The works L'or Des Fous and Enclosure of Reproduction are the result of her research and interest in representing the ineffable phenomenon of the numinous experience. Numinous, a concept coined by the German theologian Rudolf Otto, describes ‘persons, things or situations having a deep emotional resonance, psychologically associated with experience of the self - referring to a dynamic agency or effect independent of the conscious will.’

Ezz Monem’s work Revolutionary failure (2021) was made in response to the tenth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. Monem revisited the images he had made during the eighteen days of protest in Cairo in 2011. A selection of these images were rephotographed, with an acid used to erase the emulsion from the film surface, before the photograph was manually developed. The resulting images were located between rephotographs and deliberate erasures. The images marked the passing of the revolution from lived experience into the realm of historical event; reflecting a process of remembering paired with an attempt to forget.

Recent textile works by Mardi Nowak expand on her ongoing exploration into ways in which tapestry and dressmaking techniques can come together to form dynamic, non-paper collages. I’m Sure You Will Tell Me How I Should Feel Today, (Blue Monday) merges pop culture references with the ancient art of tapestry, whilst Nowak’s fabric collage, Layered Covers (Epaulet), explores female identity through layering, texture, and the contrast between positive and negative space.

Jake Preval’s expanded sculptural practice addresses the rituals and intimate enactments of queer desire, engaging sex—and, often, the materials of sex—to operate at the intersection of humour, celebration and social critique. 

Sally Smart is renowned for her large-scale cut-out assemblages, collages, installations and performances that explore identity politics, the body, and cultural histories. Smart’s most recent works, Danser Brut (Abstract), 2025 and Danser Brut (Collage), 2025, continue her ongoing interest in dance and performance and highlight the repetition, the patterns, the bodily represented through psychic states. 

David Hugh Thomas uses collage as a sliding door through which he can access both imaginative revelations and the subconscious, working fast in abstract masses, discovering the details later. In his works The pious bird and two omens, Crags and peaks and Cornucopian landscape, he constructs monochromatic Arcadian landscapes imbued with ominous portents.

Ezz Monem appears courtesy of THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne.

David H Thomas appears courtesy of William Mora Galleries, Melbourne.