LISA SAMMUT

UNSW Galleries, Sydney: 'How the earth will approach you’ is an exhibition of recent works that explore the cosmos as a framework for understanding the dynamics, relations, and dimensions of our personal and social worlds. Sammut has recently turned towards the medium of handmade glass, creating intimate, hand-held objects that speak to ideas of expanse and magnitude. Conceived as ‘cosmic eggs’, the glass sphere has become a recurring motif in recent projects, where it reflects, flips, warps, and distorts its surrounding environment. The sphere or ‘crystal ball’ is culturally understood to be a tool for self-reflection, a way to grasp the indefinite and unclear, to glimpse our future and know our fate. Overlaying celestial phenomena and human narratives, Sammut investigates themes of otherness, power, and agency, using the metaphorical qualities of interplanetary movement to reconsider the role of the individual, and the sway of the collective. 28 JUN - 8 SEP 2024. CNR OF OXFORD ST AND GREENS RD, PADDINGTON. NSW 2021.

nightshifts at Buxton Contemporary: new commission for exhibition nightshifts is a contemplative new group exhibition that considers the importance of solitude through contemporary arts practice. Drawing from the Michael Buxton and the University of Melbourne Collections, the exhibition looks to the ‘after hours’ as a metaphor to explore the restorative qualities of rest, privacy and temporary seclusion from peers and public. Spanning a range of themes, histories and media, the exhibition offers a meditative counterpoint to the recurring emphasis on collaboration and hyper-visibility in contemporary practice.

nightshifts offers a conceptual exploration of time spent away from the public eye: unseen moments alone in the studio, during the quiet of the night, and subconsciously – or while asleep. Rather than focusing on notions of loneliness or despair, artists demonstrate the fertile aspects of solo practice and quiet periods of reflection. Meditation through arts practice is explored through works where breathing and mark-making are inextricably linked, and perspectives on Deep Listening demonstrate the power of singular focus to sharpen attention and reveal things ‘unseen’.

Opens 26th May 2023. Curated by Hannah Presley and Annika Aitken.

TIME Ian Potter Interdisciplinary Forum: Bringing academic expertise and artists’ perspectives together for this popular annual event, we’ll embark upon an engaging day of presentation and discussion on how we experience, measure and harness TIME. We live in a time of urgency around many pressing societal and environmental needs – time is short and rapid solutions are needed, while we remain mired in indecision. Yet this is only part of the story of duration. TIME reveals itself to us in myriad ways – in the human life cycle, our shared oral histories, the hours of the working day, seasonal changes and eroding rocks. This year’s forum will take time-out from the day-to-day to reflect. Following a keynote presentation from Gerald McMaster, curator, artist, author, and professor emeritus OCAD University, Toronto, we’ll traverse deep time, anxious time, cycles and rhythms across three dynamic sessions. The day will be rhythmically punctuated by Submerged, a participatory audio score for ALL bodies, by choreographer and writer Amaara Raheem. Forum participants will include artists Robert Andrew, Lisa Sammut and Yasmin Smith, alongside University of Melbourne experts from a range of disciplines including social and political studies, geochronology, contemplative studies, and media and communication. 23 Sep 2023 10am – 4pm. Old Quad (Building 150) The University of Melbourne.

Canberra Glassworks Residency: I'll be working towards a new body of work for exhibition in 2023, experimenting with glass, light and video. Image: Eclipse (1889) The Harvard College Observatory. This project has been supported by a Arts Projects Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. 

a circular logic: solo exhibition of new work at Canberra Glassworks. Opens 26th July 2023. Image: Lisa Sammut, studio detail of work in progress (2023) hand blown glass, timber, video projection.

The Unseen: group show curated by Parramatta Artist Studios at The Leo Kelly Blacktown Arts Centre. Opening 3 August 2023. Image: Lisa Sammut, found image and torn paper (WIP).

Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, NSW: Radial Sign sees artist Lisa Sammut consider the ways cosmic forms and forces mirror the elusive dynamics, relations and dimensions of our social worlds. In a new immersive work incorporating objects, light and moving image, Sammut draws on  natural, cultural, and historical imagery, transforming familiar visual language in unexpected ways. Radial Sign extends Sammut’s interest in overlaying celestial phenomena and human narratives to investigate themes of otherness, power, and agency. Working in sculpture, video and installation, Sammut’s practice oscillates between notions of cosmic perspective, belonging, connection and time. Privileging the poetic, intuitive and experiential, her immersive installations use a wide range of media to alter perceptions and question human-centric thinking. 6 oct. — 18 nov. 2023. Image credit: source image (the group), photograph by the artist.

Bundanon Artist in Residence: I will be in residence at Bundanon in the first half of 2023. Bundanon’s Artists in Residence program supports new work, research and collaborations by professional artists and researchers from around the world.This multi-disciplinary residency program is the largest in Australia and provides artists time conceive and develop new work and ideas in the iconic Shoalhaven landscape.

The Unconformity Residency in 2022: With the support of Arts Tasmania, The Unconformity provides opportunities for artists practising any artform to conduct a residency in Queenstown, in remote Western Tasmania, Australia. The Unconformity Artist in Residence Program provides artists with time and support to research, build relationships and focus on their practice in the provocative West Coast environment. Website

FULL CIRCLE: is an exhibition of new work including objects and moving image that consider the length of a human life in connection to transitions and cycles in the cosmos; the circular, orbital, elliptical and eclipse. Drawing on historical astronomical diagrams and illustrations documenting the movements and appearance of comets, FULL CIRCLE  loops between the earthly and otherworldly, bringing the human condition and cosmic forces into close relationship. Tuesday 4 January - Sunday 20 March, The Cube, Level 2, Mosman Art Gallery. This project is supported by an Arts Activities Grant from ArtsACT. 

Ramsay Art Prize 2021, at Art Gallery of South Australia: Open to Australian artists under 40 working in any medium, finalist works are selected by an eminent panel of judges and shown in a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia. The winning work is judged from the exhibition and is acquired into the Gallery’s collection with the winning artist receiving $100,000, thanks to the generosity of the James & Diana Ramsay Foundation.In 2021, the Ramsay Art Prize judges are Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens, Dr Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Director of Programs at Carriageworks and Rebecca Evans, Curator of Decorative Arts & Design at AGSA. The winner will be announced on Friday 21 May 2021. The exhibition will be held from 22 May to 22 August 2021.​ website

The National 2021: New Australian Art - Staged concurrently at three of Sydney’s premiere cultural institutions – the Art Gallery of NSW, Carriageworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art – The National 2021: New Australian Art presents 39 emerging, mid-career and established Australian artists, collectives and collaboratives working in a diverse range of media across the country and overseas. The exhibition at the Gallery, co-curated by Matt Cox and Erin Vink, presents 14 artist projects that explore the potential of art to heal and care for fragile natural and social ecosystems. In considering our relationship to sentient Country, as both a concept and lived experience, these works engender an attentiveness in and about the world. Art Gallery of NSW, 26 Mar – 5 Sep 2021. Website

Supernatural Light Affinity, group show at ANCA Gallery: Artists Yvette Hamilton, Ali Noble, Lisa Sammut and Helen Shelley share a collective veneration for their internal and external worlds in Supernatural Light Affinity. These artists are brought together by a desire to harness a sense of the unintelligible and supernatural, through works that consider light, reflectivity, and sensualilty. Their combined artistic chemistry asks that we reinstate the poetic; that inspiring awe is a valid political and personal strategy. It feels unfashionable or naïve to conjure optimism, but perhaps collaboration, cooperation and glitter are a means to resistance and endurance. OPENING EVENT Wednesday 24 February from 6:00pm at ANCA Gallery, ACT.

20:20, group show at MAMA, Albury: 20:20 brings together twenty contemporary Australian artists, commissioned at the beginning of the pandemic to create work for our major Summer exhibition. The twenty new works in 20:20 share visions of a changed world, a more just society, critiques of environmental policy, and the fight for racial justice. 20:20 witnesses our current calamity and seeks insight, kindness and hope. The twenty resulting artist projects provide an active picture that moves from celebrating intimate moments of day to day life, to the actions of artists determined to forge ahead with work whilst so much shuts down around them, and out to artists’ perspectives on the globally felt issues of economic injustice, the Black Lives Matter movement, and climate emergency. There is discord here and there is community. There is social engagement alongside introspection. Sadness can be witnessed and hope shared. Open 30 October 2020 - 31 January 2021. See website: here.

Firstdraft Fundraising Auction 2020: I have contributed a work: 'a subtle smile' (2019) timber, paint, clock mechanism, battery.  From an ongoing series of time-based sculpture that explore the perception of a sentimental gesture within the modest movements of objects. Online auction here.

Waiting Room at UNSW Library: Thank you to the UNSW Library Alumni Mural Program for commissioning me to install a new work in an unusual space. Titled 'Waiting room' (2019) this work explores themes of energy and action, in a space where there is typically an experience of time standing still, encouraging viewers to take the opportunity to carefully contemplate their future actions with intention. Link to video documentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqOCilsddhU

Dream Sequence at KINGS Artist-Run: Amber Koroluk-Stephenson, Eloise Kirk, Jelena Telecki, Lisa Sammut & Nicola Smith. Playing on the filmic storytelling technique used to set apart brief interludes from the main story, this exhibition makes reference to theatre, cinema, surrealism, the familiar and unknown to explore slippages between reality and fantasy within spaces where these distinctions remain ambiguous. Dream Sequence aims to capture the potency and poetry in fragmented states of meaning and understanding through equivocal visual dialogs represented through personal and collective memory, gesture, intimacy and immediacy. KINGS Artist Run, Middle Gallery, 11 Jan 2020–1 Feb 2020. Opening 6pm Friday January 10th. Image: Lisa Sammut, when things gather (2020), HD video, wood, paint, fabric, digital print

Intimate Immensity at Outer Space: 12 – 27 October 2019. Includes new and recent work by Ali Bezer, Anastasia Booth, Sundari Carmody, Kinly Grey, Jenna Lee and Lisa Sammut. The exhibition is curated by Katherine Dionysius and Amy-Clare McCarthy. Outer Space, 1/170 Montague Road, South Brisbane QLD 4101.

Residencies August-October 2019: I'll be spending 2 months at Heima Art Residency in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland followed by an intensive 1-week Video & Installation Art session with artist Laure Prouvost at CAMP FR in the Pyrenees mountains, France. Many thanks to the Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund for an Ignite Grant, as well as Create NSW for a NSW Artists' Grant administered by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA), for supporting this time of research, experimentation and professional/new work development.

Site Works : commissioned by the City of Sydney, Time Forms (2019) will begin appearing on hoardings around Sydney. Further details can be found here.

Other Suns at Fremantle Arts Centre: I'll be including 'a monumental echo' in an exhibition curated by Erin Coates & Jack Sargeant at Fremantle Arts Centre; opening 26 July 2019.

Featuring local, national and international artists who embrace the science fictional imagination, Other Suns focuses on the less familiar underbellies of science fiction: the hybrid, the noisy, the forbidden, and the vernacular. Artists explore the detritus of the future, the ecologies of other spaces, and the polymorphic technologies of tomorrow.

Other Suns probes the trajectory of science fiction from its counter culture New Wave outwards, moving in all directions simultaneously. The human imagination unveiled on digital screens, in junkyard sculptures, and at all points in between. From terraformed suburbs to ancient landscapes, the pleasures of the limitless flesh to alternative manifestations of space travel. The universe and dreams, dreams and desires, the surrealism of science fiction and minds unleashed: Other Suns engages with the individual imagination as the key element in the science fiction vision.

Under other suns new worlds form.

Photo: Zan Wimberley

HIGH LOOM: new suspended installation commissioned by the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, opening 20th July 2019.

HIGH LOOM is an interplanetary performance; a courtship between distant things. It is a theatrical staging of the otherworldly and a space for harnessing the energies of cosmic time and expansion. In this work, I have focused on the magical relations that emerge between objects in motion. I am interested in how motion and emotion interact; how the liquid, flowing movements might mirror or connect with the viewers own active, breathing, particle bodies. We are not just terrestrial but cosmic beings; our precarious destiny is intertwined with the events and laws of the universe. HIGH LOOM reflects on the melodrama and optimism of our cosmic condition. It considers the human desire to locate existence within a higher framework, bringing human sentiment and cosmic forces into a comprehensible relationship.

Image: Lisa Sammut, HIGH LOOM, 2019 (video still)

Between Clouds and Screensavers at Toy Returns ARI: curated by Oliver Hull. Artists: Sara Ludy, Alex Last (Soda-Lite), Leah Beeferman, Therese Keogh and Lisa Sammut. Our understandings of the world are shaped by technologies of perception. Images, scans, sensor data — these are the media that determine our view of nature and the cosmos. Such media are never purely representational, but always entangled with notions of measurement and epistemology. The artists in ‘Between Clouds and Screensavers’ recalibrate these forms. Instead of focusing on defined points, they allow for indeterminacy and poetry, exceeding what the media was initially intended for. Works in this exhibition range from personal diagrams of cosmic phenomenon to simulations using the mathematical principles found in the formation of rivers. ‘Between Clouds and Screensavers’ asks what can these functional images provide when they are recalibrated? What do these hybrid forms sense? and How do they enable us to see differently? Toy Returns ARI- Fremantle, Western Australia, April 2019.

Link to Crystal-ball online Television station where videos may be viewed: http://crystal-ball.stream/

Close Encounters: Group exhibition at USFIN ATELIER. Anna McMahon, Brendan Van Hek, Consuelo Cavaniglia, Jonny Niesche, Lisa Sammut, Lucas Davidson, Melissa Howe & Paul Williams. Tim Bruniges. Monday to Friday 11am - 6pm. Saturday and Sunday 10am - 6pm. 23 November - 1 December. Suite 2.21, 75 Mary Street, St Peters, Sydney.

All the Parts I like About You: Parramatta Artist Studios Exhibition 2018 at the Ideas Platform, Artspace. Tom Blake, Chris Dolman, Emily Parsons-Lord, Lisa Sammut and Garry Trinh. "Each year the PAS exhibition in the Ideas Platform is launched alongside the annual NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship, reflecting the creative synergies of practitioners working across New South Wales". Opening Thursday 15 November, 6pm. Exhibition Dates: 16 November – 16 December, 2018. Artist Talks: Saturday 1 December, 1:30pm. Address: The Gunnery, 43–51 Cowper Wharf Rd, Woolloomooloo.

a monumental echo: solo exhibition at Firstdraft, Sydney opens Wednesday 5 September 2018. a monumental echo is aninstallation of monuments and props within an animated primordial sea of stone.As a series of gnomonic constructions, the works attempt to communicate withthe otherworld, offering access points for mental transportation. We areearthbound, but through the material of this place, the rhythms, the tides, theevidence of time eroded and energies that shuffle the geologic, we don’t haveto be. Earth provides the elements that can transport us into the galacticdistance. Temporality and similitude offer an opening for sensual exchange,moving together, mirrors and echoes, a reciprocity between living andnon-living beings. In time, we can travel out into the molten cosmic ocean. Theseismic universe is a uniting force, as a collective we are effected by itselemental architecture, its flows and shifts, its bursts and fizzles. Acelestial hierarchy in which we are intimately connected. a monumentalecho considers the human desire to locate existence within a higherframework, bringing human sentiment and cosmic forces into a comprehensiblerelationship. Firstdraft, 13-17 Riley St, Woolloomooloo. Exhibition runs til 28 September 2018.

John Fries Award: finalist exhibition opens Friday 28 September 2018.

From Where We Stand at Artbank, Sydney: Curated by Tony Stephens, From Where We Stand explores the subjective nature of perspective and its inseparable relationship to experience. As individuals, we are physically and emotionally shaped and reshaped over time which, in turn mediates our experience of the world, our place in it and an ever evolving sense of self. A series of classical landscape paintings drawn from the Artbank collection form the foundation of the exhibition. Six artists practicing with varied intent have been invited to respond to the core theme and explore how personal experience and a collective understanding of the world are at the same time both singular and pluralistic. From Where We Stand includes works by artists Yvette Coppersmith, Ricky Emmerton, Anna McMahon, Sean Meilak, Rusty Peters, Lisa Sammut and more. Opening Thursday, 6-8pm, 17 May. Artbank Gallery 222 Young Street Waterloo NSW 2011, Monday – Friday 10am – 5pm til 24 August 2018 .

Conscious Process at Artbank, Sydney: Curated by Lucy Willet - Conscious Process draws together a diverse group of contemporary Australian artists whose approach to making their work is almost an artwork in itself. From building an entire set to create the perfect photograph, to manipulating screen-printing processes, this exhibition draws on artworks recently welcomed to the Artbank collection from artists employing a wide range of media. Investigating artists working with an immersive studio practice, labour intensive post-production techniques and those fleshing out their ideas on the canvas, Conscious Process  showcases artworks where the final product is a manifestation of a deliberate engagement with creation. Artbank Gallery 222 Young Street Waterloo NSW 2011, Monday – Friday 10am – 5pm till 4 May.

Angles & Views at Cold Cuts ARI: Group show - Shan Turner Carroll, Hannah Rose Carroll Harris, Lisa Sammut and Laura Taylor. Curated by Talia Smith. Gallery open on Saturday 10 February 12-2PM. Closing celebration on Sunday 11 February 5-7PM. Address: 212 Corunna Rd, Petersham.

Around the time at Fairfield City Museum & Gallery, opening 2pm 25 November 2017: Around the time is an installation of material constellations, kinetic models and modest earthbound monuments to cosmic scale. Arranged as a miniature panorama of prop-like objects, the work responds to the idea of the museum as a site and space for temporal speculation. Drawing on the forms and principles of astro-archaeology, celestial architecture, time-keeping as well as geologic diagrams and model-making, each assemblage in Around the time looks to the likeness, alignments and chemistry between cultural artefacts, natural forms and handmade objects as a performative and relational tool for embodying a sense of magnitude and expansion.

This project has benefited from an Arts & Design Grant courtesy of Arc @ UNSW Limited

Modest monument, Private Projects, Hobart. OPENING 12 - 3pm Saturday 4 November 2017. Suite 7, Level 1, Moonah Centre. Enter from Hopkins St, up the stairs.: Modest monument is an exhibition of woodwork objects and timepieces that play with observable representations of time unfolding. Drawing on the shapes of ancient universal symbolism, cosmography, celestial architecture and the forms of diagrammatic planetary dynamics they consider the likeness, alignments, chemistry, and mimesis between things as a relational tool to grasp, perform or embody a sense of expansion. Exhibition runs 4 November - 2 December 2017. Open Saturdays 10 - 4 and by appointment.

I've been awarded the Girl Genius Award 2017 for my work form deforms you (2017) as part of the Kudos Emerging Artist + Designer Awards at Kudos Gallery, UNSW Art & Design. Many thanks to Tess Allas, Miranda Samuels, judge Maud Page and all the donors for their support! The exhibition runs 22 August - 9 September, 2017 at Kudos Gallery, 6 Napier Street, Paddington.

Playlist at the Yellow House, opening Thursday 5 October 6-8pm: Playlist brings together artists Gemma Avery, Charles Cooper, Susan Foster, Julian Hooper, Michael McIntyre, Kyle Murrell, Lisa Sammut and Rebecca Shanahan to present an exhibition whose visual language is considered and idiosyncratic. Simultaneously interdependent and solitary, these works act as elegant counterpoints to one another. Playlist is a personal compendium of contemporary visual artists assembled by artist Gemma Avery. If the artworks were songs then she’d be playing them to you. Probably on a turntable. Definitely reading the lyrics. In music parlance, counterpoint is the relationship between voices that are harmonically interdependent, yet independent in rhythm and contour. Playlist, an exhibition that works across collage, photography, painting and installation, achieves a unique collective expression while maintaining the singular sensibilities of the artists. Exhibition continues till Sunday 15 October. Yellow House: 57-59 Macleay Street, Potts Point.

Firstdraft Auction 2017, 6 – 9pm Friday 1 September at Firstdraft 13-17 Riley Street, Woolloomooloo. I've donated a small work that will be up for silent auction. all at once (2015) various timbers, ink on paper, paint.

I have just returned from a research trip to European active volcanic and alpine territories:  Mt Etna / Mt Stromboli / Mt Vesuvius / Vulcano / The Dolomites / Tirol Mountains looking for geologic material and documentation of deep time, primordial landscapes and glimpses of early earth. Image: Cratere del Laghetto, Mt Etna, Italy.

NEVEREVEN at Visual Bulk, Hobart - Eloise Kirk, Amber Koroluk-Stephenson, Lisa Sammut and Leigh Rigozzi. NEVEREVEN is an aesthetic and conceptual response to fictionalized or abstracted place and its links with the sublime. The four artists have each make a work that responds to the human connection with utopia and the surreal formations these places take. Their primary focus is the aesthetic and poetic abstractions formed through these desires and the ethereal and suspended space between our existence and its potential dislocations and slippages.  Opening 6pm 13th May 2017, the exhibition will be open by appointment from Sunday 14th - Saturday 20th May.

Sainsbury Sculpture Grant 2016: looking forward to mid 2017 when I will undertake an intensive woodcarving course at the Geisler-Moroder Schnitz und Bildhauerschule in Tirol, Austria followed by self-directed research collecting natural and cultural materials, photographs and objects in iconic natural landscapes including the European Alps as well as the active volcanic territory in Southern Italy. Many thanks to the Madeline Olive Taylor estate and NAVA for their support.

Heavenly Daze at Mailbox Art Space, Melbourne: Cameron Hibbs, Betra Fraval, Mark Lawrence Hoffman, Melanie Irwin, Sean Meilak, Lisa Sammut, Ben Thomas, Jake Treacy. Curated by Jake Treacy. 5 – 29 April 2017. Opening night: Thursday 6 April 2017. Heavenly Daze explores the omnipresence of universal proportions and balance in art, music and architecture. Drawing upon classical thinking and philosophy of the ancients, the artists in this exhibition are assembled for their contemporary sensibility to sacred geometry, divine architecture, platonic form, and the harmony of the spheres. Channelled across the 19 vitrines of Mailbox Art Space and echoing throughout the heritage space of Pawson House, sound, sculpture and poetry synthesise the invisible and manifest the metaphysical, drawing down lofty ideas and making concrete the maxim as above, so below. Heavenly Daze aims to initiate a new dialogue surrounding lost knowledge, and to attain arcane understanding through contemporary art making.

tapestries for galaxies at Verge Gallery, Sydney. Opening Wednesday 1 March 2017 at 6pm. Exhibition runs till 1 April.  tapestries for galaxies is concerned with the knowledge of a distant cosmic reality - so present in imagination yet far removed from the grasp of our immediate senses. A panoramic constellation of celestial structures and handmade prop-like objects, the installation presents a speculative new cosmography, where the historical practice of diagrammatical illustrations of an interconnected universal whole takes material form. Drawing on relations rather than representations, tapestries for galaxies looks to the likeness, alignments, chemistry and mimesis between objects as a relational tool for embodying a sense of expansion. While questioning the tendency for automatic and singular perspectives, this exhibition expands on the artists’ current interest in the emergence of a social, cultural and philosophical cosmic anxiety, where the astronomic, ecologic and geologic spheres can be understood as a condition of our time. 

Slide Night: The Archive as Constellation. Thursday 16 March, 6pm at Verge Gallery. Slide Night: The Archive as Constellation presents a series of short talks by specialists working across the fields of art, archaeology, history and natural sciences. Each presenter will discuss a sequence of images that focus in on some of the rare, unusual or revealing archival documents, photographs and collections they work with. Taking on the format of an open and informal gathering, the evening will allow for the possibility of new connections, relations and alignments between images and ideas to emerge. Introduction: Lisa Sammut, Artist. Presenters: Liz Mackinnon, Records Coordinator, Rare Books and Library Collections, Australian Museum; Nyree Morrison, Senior Archivist, The University of Sydney and Candace Richards, Acting Senior Curator, Nicholson Museum. 

Image credit: Tempest Anderson,Volcanic dust Mount Soufriere. 1902. The Tempest Anderson Photographic Archive held at York Museums Trust.

World Material: group exhibition curated by Chloé Wolifson at Darren Knight Gallery. Including works by Connie Anthes, Rebecca Gallo, Eloise Kirk, Michelle Nikou, Lisa Sammut, Lotte Schwerdtfeger, Yasmin Smith and Louise Weaver. Exhibition opens on Saturday 28 January from 4 - 6pm and continues until 25 February. Gallery hours are Tuesday - Saturday 10am - 5pm. 

World Material brings together the work of Australian artists whose works explore the spaces between strength and delicacy, between the material and the conceptual, between accident and intent, between the real and the fictional, and between representation and abstraction - embodying an exploration, recontextualisation, and sometimes deliberate obfuscation of natural, found and human-made materials. The exhibition is intended as an exploration of these tensions, suggesting totem-like resonances within and between the works of these artists. 

White Island, NZ: Just returned from a research trip to numerous volcanic sites in the North Island where I collected photography/video of this active geologic and prehistoric landscape. Image: main crater, White Island, NZ.

MFA at UNSW Art & Design begins 2016. Taking intersections as a starting point: Celestial Architecture / Astro Archaeology / Geo Mythology. Grateful to receive an Australian Postgraduate Award for the next two years so I can focus on things and  most excited for planned field trips to remote places close to home in the Australia+Asia+Pacific region including mountain observatories, desert landscapes and volcanic islands.

The Churchie National Emerging Art Prize. QUT Art Museum, Brisbane. Opening Friday 19 August 2016 6-8pm: I've been awarded the Sam Whiteley Memorial Commendation Prize for my installation for the time being (2015-16). Exhibition runs till 13 November 2016.

For the time being at Bus Projects. I've put together an A3 double-sided risograph print to accompany the exhibition. Available for $5 each, edition of 130. Printed at the Rizzeria, Sydney.

For the time being: at Bus Projects, Melbourne. Opening Wednesday 20 July 2016. Runs till 6 August 2016. For the time being aims to embody a sense of expansion and immediacy with the many versions and monuments of time: lunar, solar, historical, geological, astronomical and cosmic. Questioning the tendency for automatic and singular perspectives, this exhibition draws on principles and forms from the fields of theatre design, astro-archaeology and natural history. An entirely wall-based constellation of kinetic timepieces and wooden prop-like objects, it merges natural remnants and mineral formations with familiar cultural and observable representations of time unfolding. Some contain subtle moving elements that tick, rotate or swing. Purposeful objects such as clock faces with the energies and laws of nature, contrast against orbital mobile rocks, planetary movements and stellar transitions. 

This project has benefited from an Arts & Design Grant courtesy of Arc @ UNSW Limited

As if light could be translated: at Firstdraft. Curated by Samantha Williams and Annika Kristensen. Opening: 6-8pm Wednesday 4 November 2015. Runs till 27 November. Firstdraft 13-17 Riley Street, Woolloomooloo. 'As if light could be translated’ brings together a group of artists who are interested in ideas of the universe, astrology, constellations, space, distance and the science of stars. In lieu of a curatorial rationale, we have borrowed the words of poet Louis MacNeice, whose description of ‘holes, punched in the sky’, recalls the glorious wonder of grappling the infinitude of the universe and the incomprehensible passage of time required to translate light from the stars.

Star-gazer
Forty-two years ago (to me if to no one else
The number is of some interest) it was a brilliant starry night
And the westward train was empty and had no corridors
So darting from side to side I could catch the unwonted sight
Of those almost intolerably bright
Holes, punched in the sky, which excited me partly because
Of their Latin names and partly because I had read in the textbooks
How very far off they were, it seemed their light
Had left them (some at least) long years before I was.
And this remembering now I mark that what
Light was leaving some of them at least then,
Forty-two years ago, will never arrive
In time for me to catch it, which light when
It does get here may find that there is not
Anyone left alive
To run from side to side in a late night train
Admiring it and adding noughts in vain.
- Louis MacNeice

Image: Ash Kilmartin, Artefact and Letter, 2015 (still), single-channel HD digital video, 16:9, colour, silent, 12 minutes. Courtesy the artist.

every now and then: solo exhibition at Firstdraft. Opening: 6-8pm Wednesday 2 September 2015. Runs till 25 September. Firstdraft 13-17 Riley Street, Woolloomooloo.  Every now and then began with the romantic notion that all of natural and cultural history is an epic panorama, embracing the present, past and the future in continuum. A constellation of prop-like objects, this work merges natural remnants, mineral formations, tectonic forces and planetary movements with cultural and observable representations of time unfolding. A vision of magnitude in dioramic scale, every now and then considers and seeks closeness with the many versions and monuments of time: lunar, solar, geological, astronomical and cosmic.

Brand X Visual Arts Studio Residency: a 6 month residency April - October 2015 where I'll be working on a new project titled every now and then.

ANIMAL/MINERAL/PHYSICAL/SPIRITUAL: at the Bearded Tit, Redfern. Curated by Chloé Wolifson. Featuring the work of Rebecca Gallo, Sarah Goffman, Lisa Sammut + Lotte Schwerdfeger in collaboration with Louise Meuwissen. OPENING NIGHT: Monday 31 August 2015 from 6-8pm SHOW CONTINUES: until 10 October 2015. 

Imagine making sense of some of the most confusing song lyrics of all time ('Drop the monkey, smell my perfume...')? Curator-in-residence Chloé Wolifson does just that with ANIMAL/MINERAL/PHYSICAL/SPIRITUAL: transforming Joan Armatrading's iconic track into a paean for 5 female artists who are themselves bower birds of happenstance. This month, the Bearded Tit becomes the staging post for the fetishisation of found, organic and man-made materials that have been recontentextualised, hoarded or arranged into strange new forms. In our STREETSPACE, Lisa Sammut has installed a celestial sundial alongside Rebecca Gallo's desert tide accumulations and geo-time paste-ups in THE LANEWAY. Inside, you'll find Sarah Goffman's collection of shampoo bottles paying soapy homage to female artists she admires in our CURIOSITY CABINET, while Lotte Schwerdfeger and Louise Meuwissen collaboratively riff off taffeta and wire to create a kaleidoscopic wall installation in THE SALON. And on our TAXIDERMY T.V., a family assortment of house- and hand-made videos by the artists top off the collection. Turns out it doesn't matter what the words are if the rhythm makes you feel good.

OBJECTIFYING ELSEWHERE: My work the new moon is included in this exhibition down in Melbourne. Opening: 12th August, 6-8pm. Exhibition dates: 13th August - 4th September. Kate Beckingham, Brett Breedon, Rachel Schenberg, Lisa Sammut, Kai Wasikowski. Curated by Luke Letourneau. SEVENTH Gallery 155 Gertrude St, Fitzroy. 

‘Objectifying Elsewhere’ makes visible our relationship to the intangible. Through sculpture, motorized objects, photography, lenticular imagery and sound the artists present objects in dialogue with perception, their surrounding space and their own materiality. By playing with these material and perceptual boundaries the exhibition call attention to the spectacle of spectatorship.

Hazelhurst Art on Paper: My video work you are sensible is a finalist in this years award. The exhibition will be open 30 May - 26 July at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre.

Firstdraft Auction 2015: 6 - 9pm Friday 31 July at Firstdraft 13-17 Riley Street, Woolloomooloo. My work the old moon will be up for silent auction.

Island Salon at Underbelly Arts Festival: 1 & 2 August 2015 at Cockatoo Island, Sydney. Curated by Sophie Kitson, Angela Garrick & Danielle Zorbas. For the festival I have collaborated with Katherine Corcoran on a video work titled so called absence. 

Created by a truly interdisciplinary group of filmmakers, artists and curators, Island Salon sets it sights on developing a new underbelly of creative cinema among female artists. Island Salon features an exhaustive array of artists working across a broad spectrum in an immersive, island-inspired cinema installation. This intimate Festival-within-a-festival celebrates women in cinema as a thriving yet underrepresented community. Be your own island; choose between a dedicated array of experimental cinematic works and discover what resonates with you in this meandering cinema.

Specific Gravity: Curated by Guy Louden at Moana Project Space, opening 6:30pm 5 June 2015, exhibition runs till 28 June, MOANA PROJECT SPACE, 1F 618 HAY ST, PERTH WA. The exhibition will include my work: gravity II (2015). Andrew and David Wood (WA), Emma Hamilton (VIC), Lisa Sammut (NSW), Oliver Hull (WA), Saskia Doherty (VIC), and Simon Finn (VIC). 
Specific Gravity presents a body of sculpture, drawing, image and video works that show the way big indefinite things can be embedded in small hard things. 'Specific Gravity', a scientific term, is a way of measuring the density of one substance in relation to another. In this exhibition, artists explore the complex interdependencies of substance in natural phenomena and history. They consider the relationship between the micro and the macro, the graspable and the nebulous, the mundane earthbound and the cosmological universal. 

Forever is an optimistic view: Kylie Banyard / Katherine Corcoran / Jana Hawkins-Andersen / Eloise Kirk / Lisa Sammut at Archive_, 5 Eliza Street Newtown
OPENING 6-8PM WEDNESDAY 15 APRIL 2015. RUNS TILL 2 MAY. 

Forever is an optimistic view brings together the work of a group of eternal optimists. Despite the impossibility of being forever and everywhere, this project asks the artist to go on and try anyway, exploring alternative material certainties for what often lies just beyond our reach. Seeking form for the formless, where perceived limitations are just the beginning. This project will comprise of two components: an exhibition and a small limited-edition reader. The reader will act as support material for the works included in the exhibition and will be available on opening night. Taking a closer look at where these ideas meet, cross and/or rebound, it will include a small collection of texts+diagrams+images contributed by each of the artists involved.

Image: forever is an optimistic view reader, edition of 83

107 Projects Silent Auction Fundraiser: 107 Redfern Street Redfern, 6-8pm Wednesday 1 April 2015 - so dear (2014) hand-collage photographs of sky at dawn and dusk, 5 x 6.5 cm (x2)