Emmaline Zanelli (2024), detail of studio space, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Lana Adams.
Foreword
Studios: 2024 is a showcase of the diverse practices and work developed as part of ACE’s annual Studio Program – a fully-supported professional development opportunity for South Australian artists. Curated by ACE Artistic Director Danni Zuvela, the exhibition features the many disciplines of the 2024 Studio Program artists, including painting, video, installation, assemblage and sculpture.
Carly Tarkari Dodd uses traditional Ngarrindjeri weaving techniques to critique regimes of adornment, reimagining the jewels of Empire in contemporary softsculptural forms; Abbey Murdoch combines video with scavenged materials to explore the housing crisis through the lens of low-income communities; Marian Sandberg generates a complex intertwining of bodily, physical and digital systems to reclaim and materialise a simultaneously intimate and remote relationship with reproductive technology; Katey Smoker embraces the material of paint, extending it into the third dimension with brush-less, canvas-less paintings; and Emmaline Zanelli repurposes exotic pet cages to reflect on the structures and apparatuses that produce value within the interlocking worlds we share.
ACE are honoured to host this one-of-a-kind program in South Australia. It has been a privilege to share space, time and cups of tea with our 2024 studio artist cohort, and to witness and support the development of their artistic practice over the year.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank the staff and volunteers at ACE for their many and varied efforts in making Studios: 2024 possible.
In particular, we would like to acknowledge ACE’s Associate Curator Rayleen Forester for her support of the realisation of the installation of the Studios: 2024 exhibition and for her dedication to supporting and encouraging the practices of Carly, Abbey, Marian, Katey and Emmaline.
We would also like to thank Harriet Culbertson for Studios: 2024’s publication design, as well as our contributing writers, all of whom are artists: Coby Edgar, Elvis Richardson, Pia van Gelder, Troy-Anthony Baylis, and Bec Gallo, for their considered reflections on each artist’s practice. Having artists write on artists isn’t just a pleasure to read; it provides unique peer perspectives and insights, otherwise not available, which deepen our appreciation of the works in their contexts.
ACE’s Studio Program would not be possible without the 2024 Studio Program Donors, Creative Australia, Arts South Australia and the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. ACE is committed to building pathways for South Australian artists across Australia, demonstrated by our partnerships with Helpmann Academy, Adelaide Central School of Art and firstdraft, Sydney.
Most importantly, we would like to warmly congratulate and farewell the five artists who have participated in this year’s studio program. As much as we have supported and encouraged them, their presence has enriched our shared experiences, and we have learned and grown together. We look forward to celebrating their future successes as we acknowledge the enormous care, dedication and energy they have brought to their achievements in Studios: 2024.
Louise Dunn & Dr. Danni Zuvela
Executive Director & Artistic Director, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental
Carly Tarkari Dodd
Carly Tarkari Dodd is an artist and curator of Kaurna, Narungga, and Ngarrindjeri descent, known for creating contemporary woven jewellery and sculptures.
She was taught traditional weaving by Ngarrindjeri Elder Aunty Ellen Trevorrow at a young age. Dodd’s work explores First Nations activism, cultural resilience, and highlights the contrast of Indigenous experiences with forms of colonial power. Her work has gained noteworthy recognition, with recent features at Australian Fashion Week on the David Jones Indigenous Fashion Projects Runway and in Vogue Australia magazine.
In 2018, Dodd was honoured as South Australia’s NAIDOC Young Person of the Year. In 2023, she was a finalist for the inaugural MAKE Award: Biennial Prize for Innovation in Australian Craft and Design, and in 2024, her impact continues to grow, with a nomination for two National Indigenous Fashion Awards. Carly’s works are held in both public and private collections across Australia, and she has exhibited at the Australian Design Centre (NSW), Mars Gallery (VIC), JamFactory (SA), The Mill (SA) and Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (SA).
Carly Tarkari Dodd, 2024 Studio Program artists, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Thomas McCammon.
Carly Tarkari Dodd
ACE Studio Open Day (2024), Carly Tarkari Dodd’s studio, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Lana Adams.
Carly Tarkari Dodd
Not Your Jewels!
by Coby Ann Edgar
Cutting my teeth in the Kaurna (Adelaide) arts scene over a decade ago is when I first met the young Kaurna, Narungga and Ngarrindjeri woman Carly Tarkari Dodd.
The distinguished Aunty Ellen Trevorrow taught her weaving at the age of 10, starting her off with vessels that evolved into bags and more recently adornment. The stitching practices that have been passed down to Carly are so timeless we can’t trace the first object that would have been made. They were ephemeral because of their organic materiality. What we do have are examples of masterfully crafted and designed traps, bags, vessels and mats in museum collections that date back to the early conflict era, and there are several brilliant Ngarrindjeri weavers represented. All these objects speak to the makers’ unimaginable amount of knowledge of Country, and evidences the genius of these designers. This is where Carly’s muscle memory stems from. Expert designers who worked with complex sets of knowledges.
Conceptually Carly’s work is like studying stitching techniques. The devil is in the detail and there are complex layers to unpick. There is a lot going on in Carly’s practice. Her use of positive and negative space reflects hierarchical western power structures in her woven triangular vessels. Her wall mounted oversized necklaces reflect Ngarrindjeri story mats and her chunky sister bags mirror Ngarrindjeri sister bags in the shape of their forms. Her material choices and colour theory has developed to a point where you can feel it’s her work. Carly mixes colourful shiny fabrics, twines and ribbons with neutral raffias and weaves gluttonous, voluptuous bags – all while giving a considerable amount of thought to the textural and colour pairings. She has a distinct aesthetic.
Her self-portraits in the Crown Jewels series could be read as a subversion of the Royal Family portraits. A comment on how western people of prominence (here the British Royal Family) are made into symbols of power and superiority through the repetition of this visual style. Portraits were originally commissioned to show off the assets and class status of the sitter. Carly positions herself as a subject in 19th century western portraiture style. From the torso or shoulders up. One shoulder forward and a hand purposefully placed to show off the jewellery. Her closed lipped semi-smile and neutral expression give no obvious emotion. A face you can project onto.
Is Carly making a point that western ideals of superiority are built on greed because most of the Royal ‘assets’ were ‘sourced’ from countries England colonised? Showing off the assets won from actions that continue to affect those who were colonised could at least be perceived as classist puffery. Or is Carly assuming this visual style to make use of the implied power it embodies and simply suggesting that her pieces, her body, her peoples are of equal value.
I still don’t know which one it is.
The style of portraiture is so consistent (boring), the human’s become second to their assets. There are millions of contemporary examples of how mad the obsession with the Crown jewels is in tabloid magazines alone. Red circles magnifying the gems with the price tag in bold font declaring the obscene amounts they would fetch.
For this exhibition, Carly offers us massive and chunky Royal jewels – necklaces and brooches – made from shiny satin fabrics that glisten. They are texturally compelling. You want to squeeze them and watch the shiny fabric burst up between clenched fingers. It’s visceral. They are too large for one human body to hold. More and bigger, they declare! Carly has designed her own set of Crown jewel lures.
Well, Ngarrindjeri weavers do have a long history of designing brilliant traps.
– Coby Ann Edgar
About the writer
Coby Ann Edgar (she/her), is a queer identifying Gulumirrgin (Larrakia) woman with Asian and European ancestry that reflects the cultural melting pot of her place of birth, Darwin. She currently lives and works on Gadigal lands in Sydney as a curator and writer with a current interest in embodied writing techniques as a form of spiritual and intellectual sovereignty. Coby has over a decade of experience working in the visual arts sector including the Adelaide Festival Centre, Art Gallery of South Australia, JamFactory, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Powerhouse Museum.
Carly Tarkari Dodd
Carly Tarkari Dodd
Not Your Jewels! (2024)
Satin polyester, cotton yarn, polyester stuffing and vinyl tubing
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist
Not Your Jewels! critiques the British Crown’s structure of power and wealth, revealing its fragility beneath the surface. The Crown flaunts its extensive, ethically questionable jewellery collection pieces often sourced from countries it colonised as symbols of wealth and dominance.
This installation features five large-scale woven “jewels”, made with glistening satin to mimic the sparkle of gemstones yet with a soft, almost toy-like quality. Through weaving, a practice rooted in cultural resilience, this work contrasts the strength of Indigenous knowledge with the shallow legacy of colonial power.
Carly Tarkari Dodd (2024), Studios: 2024, installation view, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Sam Roberts.
Carly Tarkari Dodd
List of Works exhibited in Studios: 2024 by
Carly Tarkari Dodd
Sapphire and Diamond necklace (2024)
Satin polyester, cotton yarn, polyester stuffing and vinyl tube
Dimensions variable
Crown Ruby necklace (2024)
Satin polyester, polyester stuffing and cotton yarn
Dimensions variable
Sovereign Orb necklace (2024)
Satin polyester, polyester stuffing, cotton yarn and vinyl tube
Dimensions variable
Emerald brooch (2024)
Satin polyester, polyester stuffing and cotton yarn
Dimensions variable
Amethyst brooch (2024)
Satin polyester, polyester stuffing and cotton yarn
Dimensions variable
Carly Tarkari Dodd (2024), Studios: 2024, installation view, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Sam Roberts.
Carly Tarkari Dodd
Abbey Murdoch
Abbey Murdoch is a multidisciplinary visual artist residing and creating on Kaurna Country in South Australia. In her installation practice, she constructs immersive environments evoking the experience of low-income and public housing.
Through her work, Murdoch seeks to unveil different perspectives on the idea of home, understood not merely as a physical structure, but as a resonant repository of memories and experiences. Her works pay testament to the lived experiences of marginalised communities, offering a platform for reflection, memorial, and dialogue.
My work delves into the nuanced experiences of home, particularly within the context of low-income housing and poverty. Through sculpture, installation, video and projection, I aim to unpack the intersection of domesticity, resilience, and political neglect. Central to my practice is the recurring motif of the swirl, a decorative pattern often found in the architectural adornments of public housing, which for me symbolises both strength and community. By manipulating materials such as bricks, lace, and reclaimed objects, I reflect on the contradictions within these spaces—places of safety and refuge, but also of abandonment and decay.
My explorations often evolve as video projections layered with personal and documented imagery, projected upon lace curtains, adding a temporal, fragile quality to the work. These projections speak to the ephemeral nature of home and the lives that move through these spaces. I am particularly interested in the stories of those living in public housing—stories often overlooked or dismissed—and aim to create work that honours their and my lived experiences while critiquing broader social systems.
Ultimately, my practice seeks to memorialise homes left behind, documenting their decay as symbols of resilience and struggle, and encouraging viewers to engage with the rich connections the community has with these spaces.
Abbey Murdoch, 2024 Studio Program artists, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Thomas McCammon.
ACE Studio Open Day (2024), Abbey Murdoch’s studio, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Lana Adams.
Abbey Murdoch
TRUST
by Elvis Richardson
TRUST, a multi-part video, sound and sculpture installation by Abbey Murdoch, purposefully reconfigures the recognisable materials used to construct and furnish public housing to explore the sensory properties, fragility and strength of these built and social spaces.
Imbued with the artist’s personal memory, familiarity and experience, Murdoch activates these materials and images as a document of the social neglect surrounding the provision and upkeep of public housing as the subject of her work.
Murdoch’s video montage features an abundant number of empty boardedup public houses that sustain the question: if the provision of public housing says, ostensibly, that as a society “We look after those in need” – what does its neglect say?
Today, the ‘Australian dream’ of a home is no longer the revered suburban monument but rather an apparition of an unreachable way of life. For decades, activists and the media have been screaming about the long-term chronic housing crisis and reported on the devastation of rental unaffordability and homelessness. When we use the word ‘housing,’ it usually implies mass housing or public housing, and its design and implementation and budgets endure as a negotiable concept. By contrast, the dominant ideals and public funding of private home ownership for occupation or investment continues unquestioned.
1 www.welivehere2017.com.au
At the intersections of art and public housing in Australia, where those singing for their supper dwell, are signposts such as What ever happened to Green Valley? (1973). Co-ordinated by Peter Weir, the film was made as a collective action with residents of the Western Sydney housing estate of Green Valley to insert their own representations of their suburb and daily lives in response to the media’s negative characterisation of their suburb. There’s also There Goes Our Neighbourhood, directed by Clare Lewis, which tells the story of the creation of #WeLiveHere2017 1, a large-scale collaborative community artwork within the Redfern housing estate’s iconic 30-storey Matavai and Turanga towers (built in inner Sydney in 1977). #WeLiveHere2017 illuminated residents’ windows with colour, designed to make visible and protest the planned demolition of the towers which will relocate residents out of the area and significantly reduce public housing in this now marketable location. Another is the ongoing project by Yanyuwa Garra artist Miriam Charlie who has been photographing the residents of Borroloola, NT, in front of their homes –temporary houses constructed in 1984 post-Cyclone Tracy, which are today literally disintegrating. Voice recordings detail the defects: exposure to the elements, no running water, shared bathroom facilities and more. Miriam Charlie titled the work My Country No Home. Her drive to make the work was “not to bring us shame, but to show people how we are living in Borroloola”. 2
Murdoch’s TRUST also brings to mind artmaking practices and legacies that destabilise and politicise the home using interpretive architectural experiences, situations, and meanings to explore the topographies of both the built environment and human life. Dwelling 3 by Kamilaroi Bigambul artist Archie Moore recreated a series of domestic interiors he describes as being “inside the memories of my childhood home” and American artist Mike Kelly’s Educational Complex, a tabletop architectural model that plots the artist’s memories of his home and schools including areas intentionally left blank.
Abbey Murdoch (2024), TRUST, still, video, courtesy the artist.
This same measured but urgent response to this very real situation is present in Abbey Murdoch’s approach to her subject that draws on her own memories to reimagine cultural representations that grow familiarity and understanding through humanising and destigmatising public housing and those who live there. Deepening the general public’s understanding and recognition of new aesthetic representations and stories is central to mobilising the message and meaning that public housing matters to residents, communities and society and art.
– Elvis Richardson
About the writer
Treasuring the intimacies of ordinary lives, Elvis Richardson collects and curates personalised objects and imagery she extracts from public sources and re-constructs them as the raw materials of her studio practice. Her works employ kitsch and formalist approaches and mediums to comment on taste, class, the sublime and her own agency as an artist when also trapped in an aspirational exposure-based system of certain economic precarity.
Richardson’s objects and images disrupt the everyday commodification of lifestyle to satirically expose the promises, disappointments and contradictions that we all live with.
Recent exhibitions include Melbourne Now: NGV (2023); Future40: Performance Space (2023); Canberra Art Biennale Contour 556: ACT (2022); Force Fields, Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial (2018); Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2018); Versus Rodin: Bodies across space and time, Art Gallery of South Australia (2017); CCP Declares: On the Social Contract, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2016); Octopus 15: Lost and Profound, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2015); and Transmission: Legacies of The Television Age, National Gallery of Victoria (2015).
Richardson has been the director of a number of artist run initiatives including First Draft (96/97), Elastic (99/00), Ocular Lab (08/10) DEATH BE KIND (2010/12) and True Estate (2017/18).
Richardson’s works are held in the collections of National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of NSW, Heide Museum of Art, Art Gallery of Ballarat, Artbank, Deakin University Collection, City of Fremantle, MerriBek Council and the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art.
Richardson is the founding editor of CoUNTess, a blog publishing data on gender representation in the Australian visual arts sector.
The first Countess Report, a sector wide benchmarking data collection project, was authored by Richardson and was released in 2016. Countess.Report was re-launched in 2017 in collaboration with Amy Prcevich and Miranda Samuels and Shevaun Wright producing the updated 2019 and 2022 Countess Reports.
Abbey Murdoch TRUST (2024)
Single channel video, 14:30 minutes, colour, sound; PVC pipe, lace curtain; salvaged bricks and gate; salvaged coffee table, embroidered doily and plastic chairs
Courtesy the artist
Abbey Murdoch seeks to unveil the impoverished experiences of home, embracing installation as a medium to evoke the resilience, vulnerability, and layered narratives within low-income domestic spaces. Her practice coalesces storytelling and social critique, illuminating the experiences of individuals managing the multifaceted challenges associated with low-income housing.
In TRUST, Murdoch explores themes of resilience, community, and the intricate relationship between institutional structures and domestic space. Using a repeating swirl motif, she creates a dialogue around the symbolism of strength in community and the repeated spirals and cycles of poverty. Combining materials salvaged from demolished public housing with a video narrative layering documentation, animation and witness accounts, Murdoch pays testament to those who once inhabited these homes.
At the heart of TRUST lies a contemplation of governmental apathy and the memories embedded in empty homes and abandoned communities.
TRUST invites viewers to engage with intergenerational stories of disadvantage and survival, capturing the bittersweet tensions between gratitude and hardship in environments that are both nurturing and harmful, materially contextualising this conversation between brick and lace.
Abbey Murdoch (2024), Studios: 2024, installation view, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Sam Roberts.
Abbey Murdoch
Abbey Murdoch (2024), TRUST, still, video, courtesy the artist. Abbey Murdoch (2024), Studios: 2024, installation view, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Sam Roberts.
Marian Sandberg
Marian Sandberg works across sculpture and installation. Through her practice, she seeks to understand what it means to be human in this age of technology.
She does so by programming a diverse collection of old and new technologies in the expanded field, offering alternative systems to inhabit, and grounds for re-thinking inherited technological norms. This is a longstanding research area for Sandberg, who holds a Master of Information Systems from the University of South Australia and a Bachelor of Visual Art from the Adelaide Central School of Art.
Sandberg became Stelarc’s first mentee in 2023, culminating with her first solo show The Presence which won the South Australian Living Artist (SALA) festival’s UnitCare Services Digital Media Award. Other recent exhibitions include Hatched: National Graduate Show 2023 at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art; Data Reveal Party (2024, The Little Machine); and Materiality (2024, Praxis Artspace). She is never quite sure where her keys are, and wonders if Siri gets tired of finding them.
Marian Sandberg, 2024 Studio Program artists, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Thomas McCammon.
Marian Sandberg
ACE Studio Open Day (2024), Marian Sandberg’s studio, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Lana Adams. ACE 2024 Studio Program Donor Event (2024), Marian Sandberg’s studio, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Peter Fong.
Marian Sandberg
Uterichoreogenesis by Pia Van Gelder
Marian Sandberg is an open book. She brings a level of full disclosure that is both daring and generous, motivated by a desire to locate and define humanity among systems of technological engagement.
In her most recent work, she seeks to open up the black box of the fertility industry and the norms that surround it, by sharing her experiences of making children while having a uterus that cannot host a foetus. Previous works by Sandberg have explored her path through the fertility industry with in-vitro fertilisation and surrogacy. Like Sandberg’s ACE Studios: 2024 exhibition artwork Remote (2024), Data Reveal Party (2024) lays bare the artist’s choice to “gestate the excess in the gallery,” presenting the human embryos that were withdrawn from cryostorage after “two were incubated… one was lost as an embryo, [and] one was lost as a four-day-old human.” 1 Those remaining are mounted, editioned and hung on the gallery wall.
For Remote, Sandberg turns to her own uterus, no longer in her body. When going into surgery for a hysterectomy, Sandberg asked her surgeon if they would document her uterus by scanning it in three dimensions. They tentatively asked her why and she explained, “I’m an artist,” which sufficed. From her digitally extracted uterus, Sandberg has made a gallery-sized mechatronic recreation.
The aesthetics of the synthesised uterus have evolved over time. Until the end of the nineteenth century, incubators were not a medical technology but an agricultural one, primarily used for poultry production, and presented as fairground attractions within an exhibitory culture that spectacularised cuttingedge medical treatments as public entertainment. (As Elizabeth Stephens points out, so strong was the association of incubators with birds that a major exhibition of premature babies in the new technology of incubators in Berlin in 1896 was popularly referred to as the Kinderbrutanstalt – “baby hatchery”).2
Half a century later, Emanuel M Greenberg’s 1955 patent for his Artificial Uterus looked something like a bathroom and septic plumbing system; while more recently artificial wombs have taken different material forms, mimicking the cellular tissue of the uterine wall with a “biobag” made of polyethylene film to encase and expand with the gestation of a lamb foetus.3
Sandberg’s scaled-up, animated womb is furnished on a pixellated foundation of recycled chair legs and soft, delicately stitched and threaded upholstery, colour matched in human-tissue tones to her bodily scan. These are the domesticated aesthetics of feminine labour that Sandberg commonly brings into
1 “Data Reveal Party”
2 Stephens, Artificial Mothers
her work. The tools and products of textiles and weaving work in tandem with custom electronics and computation, throwing back to computational code’s conception in the Jacquard loom. The work is familial and estranged in more ways than one, as Sandberg considers the ontology of her own uterus as she recalls her experience with a remote uterus; that of her surrogate. This intimate interweaving with the technology of the time fundamentally shifted Sandberg’s experience of what it means to be human through redistributing her own reproductive capability and agency.
Bioartists Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts discuss how ectogenesis (the development of embryos in artificial conditions outside of the uterus) opens questions about care along with our fundamental “ability to know life, let alone be alive.”4 It was only late last year that a number of international research teams began seriously planning human trials for artificial wombs. For humans, ectogenesis has implications for many including those without a viable uterus, those with comorbidities or disabilities that preclude them from pregnancy, and those that want to outsource the labour of pregnancy due to its part in gender inequity. It has been considered a cyberfeminist and xenofeminist project. The early feminist writer and activist Shulamith Firestone saw the artificial womb as part of a larger goal to free “women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology by every means available.”5
That the uterus is an organ existing solely for the gestating of a foetus, and otherwise lying dormant, is a story perpetuated by the patriarchal misogynistic medical industrial complex. Comparatively, we have spent very little time studying what uteri do without a fertilised ovum. The menstruating uterus is in a constant state of flux, continuously shedding and regenerating the functional layer of the endometrium, the inner layer of the organ. Sandberg’s re-engineered uterus sheds pressurised air in a cyclical fashion, sending her an email each time in a bid for connection. But the fluxing structure isn’t in constant motion; remote in both proximity and utility, Remote is programmed with motion sensors to drive its cycle, requiring a viewer’s presence to activate it. The element of spectacle recalls the (in)famous Coney Island incubator babies, another instance of the (often highly profitable) remote womb craze of the late nineteenth century, in which the tiniest of infants were presented as exhibits for goggling spectators.
3 Greenberg, Artificial uterus. Partridge et al., “An Extra-Uterine System to Physiologically Support the Extreme Premature Lamb.”
4 Ionat and Oron, Tissues, Cultures, Art, 55.
5 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, 209. As Julia Kaganskiy points out, Firestone’s ideas were controversial then and continue to be so today, “not least because she failed to develop an intersectional understanding of women’s struggles; for instance, she neglected to acknowledge the way race and class have determined which women ultimately bear the brunt of reproductive care work. Despite these shortcomings, her work has remained influential with cyberfeminists, queer theorists, and xenofeminists, who have similarly looked to technology as a means of emancipating bodies from the tyranny of nature (as it says in Laboria Cuboniks’ Xenofeminist Manifesto: “if nature is unjust, change nature!”) and advocated for uncoupling kinship and care relations from purely biological definitions”. news.artnet.com/art-world/ani-liu-2153297
Marian Sandberg
Lion’s “Children’s Incubration Institute” at the Great Industrial Exposition in Berlin, 1896. Published in the Illustrated London News, 1896. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library.
Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.
Greenberg, Emanuel M. Artificial uterus. United States US2723660A, filed July 22, 1954, and issued November 15, 1955. patents.google.com/patent/US2723660/en.
Marian Sandberg. “Data Reveal Party.” Accessed October 17, 2024. sandberg.io/ artwork/data-reveal-party.
Partridge, Emily A., Marcus G. Davey, Matthew A. Hornick, Patrick E. McGovern, Ali Y. Mejaddam, Jesse D. Vrecenak, Carmen Mesas-Burgos, et al. “An ExtraUterine System to Physiologically Support the Extreme Premature Lamb.” Nature Communications 8 (April 25, 2017): 15112. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15112.
Stephens, Elizabeth, ‘“Artificial Mothers” on the Midway: The History of Infant Incubator Exhibitions From the World’s Fair to the Funfair’, Technology and Culture, forthcoming
Remote works to emancipate Sandberg and her uterus, no longer beholden solely to medical, bodily and societal norms, instead asserting its own semiautonomous system within gallery walls. At rest until activated by a viewer’s motion, Remote is animated by a tensile system of solenoid valves and a network of 42 pneumatic cylinders that expand and retract with a shared agency of resistance, air pressure and programming. Stretching over 1.5 metres high, this uterus could house a collective, and renders a viewer into a homunculus as it expands to engulf their view. The womb is a container, both encased in the body and to encase another body. Remote does so, envelops the spectator in an act of Uterichoreogenesis; breathing, wet with electronic flux and mechanical lubricant, soft at its base and networked with an electronic nervous system that Sandberg continues to develop to one day distribute agency using a controller she plans to wear.
About the writer
Pia Van Gelder is an electronic artist, researcher and historian. Their art practice and writing investigates historical and contemporary conceptions of energies and how these shape our relationship with technology, bodies and our environment. Their historical research has concentrated on the influence of esotericism on electronic instruments of the 20th century and their book current project The Energies Artists Say is a collection co-edited with Professor Douglas Kahn presenting a methodology for understanding the polyvalence of energies in practices across the arts.
Van Gelder’s work has been shown at the Black Mountain College Museum (NC, USA), Kyoto Art Centre, SuperDeluxe Tokyo, ISEA, Langgeng Art Foundation and iCan in Yogyakarta. Their work has been commissioned by organisations such as Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Performance Space and Carriageworks. Their practice often involves designing and building electronic instruments that are presented in performance and interactive installation contexts. Van Gelder performs live at events and festivals including Liquid Architecture, with various sound and audio-visual projects. They have curated and facilitated events and been involved in a number of artist run initiatives including Dorkbot Sydney, which they founded in 2006, Moduluxxx, a festival of modular synthesis and Serial Space, an experimental art space that they codirected from 20102013 and Lanfranchis, an experimental art space codirected from 2004-2007. Often traversing the spaces of transdisciplinary and speculative art and design, their work has been discussed in recent critical texts including Prudence Gibson’s The Plant Contract, Art’s Return to Vegetal Life (Brill, 2018), Peter Weibel’s Sound Art, Sound as a Medium of Art (MIT, 2019). Their writing has been published in the Journal of Sonic Studies (16, Materials of Sound). With Caleb Kelly, they have co-authored a chapter of the forthcoming 3rd edition of Nicolas Collins, Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking (Routledge) and coedited a forthcoming collection Feminist, Queer, Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene: Archive (Open Humanities Press), with Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Sue Reid, and Astrida Neimanis.
– Pia Van Gelder
Marian Sandberg
Remote, (2024)
Pneumatic cylinders, microcontroller with WiFi connection and email account, air compressor, PVC tubing, custom 3D printed parts, steel mending brackets, hat elastic, cotton upholstery, embroidery thread, salvaged turned wood chair legs.
6 x 4m, height variable
Courtesy the artist
Marian Sandberg seeks to understand what it means to be human in this age of technology. She utilises a range of technologies, from needle and thread to electronics, breaking apart and inserting herself into systems in order to locate and define humanity among technological norms.
Remote (2024) sees Sandberg examine the relationship between technology and reproductive capability. When having her uterus removed last year, Sandberg instructed theatre staff to 3D scan it on her phone so she could take home a digital extraction. From her digitally extracted uterus, Sandberg has made a gallery-sized mechatronic recreation, motion-activated by the viewer and WiFi enabled, emailing her when it’s on its cycle.
Marian Sandberg (2024), Studios: 2024, installation view, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Sam Roberts.
Marian Sandberg
Marian Sandberg (2024), Studios: 2024, installation view, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Sam Roberts.
I couldn’t take it home in a jar. Not that I’d want to anyway – digital extraction seemed more exciting. Handing over both my phone and consciousness, I lay on the operating table, waiting for my uterus to be disconnected. It was a pretty useless organ to me, having outsourced the gestation of my kids to strangers through Facebook. Theatre staff dutifully laid out the organ, posed it as per anatomical norms and used my phone to 3D scan it. On waking, I was left with a digital artefact to reclaim and materialise.
Marian Sandberg
Katey Smoker
Katey Smoker is an abstract artist who explores the intersection of painting and sculpture by using paint as a sculptural material.
Her practice is defined by iterative, process-driven experimentation and material play, where the act of creating is as important as the final form. With a background in metallurgy and material science, Smoker delves into the physical properties and behaviours of paint to create intricate textures and structures that both acknowledge and subvert the form of the grid. Central to her approach is an engagement with unpredictability and the evolving nature of material and process, which generates a fresh perspective and new material realities at the convergence of painting and sculpture.
Smoker holds a Bachelor of Contemporary Art, University of South Australia, a Master of Business Administration (Technology Management), Deakin University, Victoria, and a Bachelor of Metallurgical Engineering from the University of South Australia. Recent exhibitions include Hatched: National Graduate Exhibition 2024, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) and the Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition 2024 where she was the recipient of the Major Exhibition Prize. Other awards include the UniSA Creative Graduate Exhibition Prize (2023); the John Christie Wright Memorial Prize for Painting (2023); the Friends of the South Australian School of Art Inc Prize (2020); and the Chancellor’s Letters of Commendation (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023).
Katey Smoker, 2024 Studio Program artists, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Thomas McCammon.
Katey Smoker
ACE 2024 Studio Program Donor Event (2024), Katey
studio, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Peter
ACE Studio Open Day (2024), Katey Smoker’s studio, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Lana Adams.
Smoker’s
Fong.
Katey Smoker
It’s no longer fluid.
by Troy-Anthony Baylis
It’s no longer fluid.
Katey Smoker’s work has essentially, at its core, a skin. The material is paint, but the paintings, if we can call them that, have no undersurface, no canvas, no paper, no bark, no board. They are constructed by the layering upon layering upon layering of readymade acrylic paint that the artist has poured onto gridded structures, allowing each pouring to dry, before detaching it from its mould so that what remains are 100% pure paint things.
The master of paint-purity, Yves Klein, managed to ban the essence of paint, pure pigment, visually untainted onto canvases and walls. He then proceeded to direct passive naked female bodies as tools of paint application in a grand male act (gesture) targeting the male gaze.
To be fair, his man-handling of the female body occurred at a time when minimal or concrete painting constituted a sphere populated almost exclusively by male artists, so it seemed. Looking back at this time with a gender-educated eye, it is evident that while there were female artists working, their paintings most likely lacked public visibility and recognition. One of the many women instrumental in changing the game in the 1980s was German conceptual artist Rosemarie Trockel, who created and exhibited large-scale industrial machine-knitted works she declared paintings. She thereby questioned the hierarchy of painting (male high-art) and textiles (female domestic-craft) by pointing out that at its base, painting is a textile – a fabric that has had paint applied to it. It is of interest then, that Katey Smoker, through a “repetitive crafting” of paint, has created paintings that are devoid entirely of a fabric surface, or even a relatively flat paint surface that typifies a painting. They form grids and structures expanding into the fields of relief and sculpture. They mimic recognisable forms and objects. In this they are recreations of possibly familiar things rather than functioning as their depictions.
In a local history of paint things, Kamilaroi Bigambul conceptual artist Archie Moore created deconstructed flag paintings in the 2010s that are made in a similar fashion to Katey Smoker’s. Yet his ‘skins,’ that refer also to bodies, can be described as painterly.
Perhaps this is because his ‘acrylic on nothing’ works are much larger in size and textural variations of larger surface areas are more likely to reveal themselves. Moore’s paint things, as flags, perform as draped material, thereby mimicking what fabrics would do if put into similar positions. With reference to Jasper Johns, these flags march in rank and file of a prominent historical dilemma: Jasper Johns’ most famous Flag, 1955, provoking the essential question: “Is it a flag, or is it a painting?” Establishing both the level of meaning and the level of form as different, and thereby rivalling layers of significance, Johns reflected upon no less than a substantial identity crisis. Moore however seems to accelerate the dilemma by defying even the common ground of painting and flag by skipping the fabric in presenting a heraldic depiction coagulated into an object of paint. Such paint stripped bare seems to ironically focus on the essence of the evoked imagery.
This excursus intends to highlight an essential aspect of Smoker’s work in pure paint. With her strategy of liberating paint from any surface ground into objects, reliefs and grids, where exactly lies the pictorial function of her paint things? Now that she has found such freedom of paint, how will she establish a narrative within these boundaries? Is not the pure love and devotion of handling paint expansive enough? It may be no longer fluid; it certainly isn’t dry.
– Troy-Anthony Baylis
About the writer
Troy-Anthony Baylis is an artist, writer, and curator, living and working in Tarndanyangga (Adelaide). His texts include book chapters, catalogue essays, arts reviews (Artlink, RealTime, InReview), peer assessed journal articles (Social Alternatives, The Conversation) and conference papers in the fields of cultural studies, traditional knowledges, queer identity, indigeneity, drag, and performance art.
Katey Smoker
Katey Smoker forms in paint (2024)
Acrylic paint
Courtesy the artist
Katey Smoker explores the physicality of paint through experimentation and material play, creating spatial compositions that move beyond traditional surfaces, expanding its possibilities as both medium and subject.
In this collection, Smoker challenges conventional ideas of what a painting can be. While it’s not new for a painting to be unframed or off the canvas, expectations like storytelling, evoking emotion, or reflecting a reality, whether literal or abstract, remain deeply ingrained in how it’s perceived. Smoker’s approach strips these away to reveal the pure essence of paint itself, highlighting its capacity to stand on its own. Whether the resulting artworks are objects, sculptures, or paintings is left open, but the material of paint itself is what emerges as elusive, responsive, unpredictable and limitless.
Katey Smoker (2024), Studios: 2024, installation view, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Sam Roberts.
Katey Smoker
List of Works exhibited in Studios: 2024 by Katey Smoker
Remnants (2024)
Acrylic paint, magnets, screws
257 x 175 x 2.5 cm
One hundred (2024)
Acrylic paint
Size variable
Clear (2024)
Acrylic painting medium
Size variable
Collapsed (2024)
Acrylic paint
19 x 36 x 40 cm
White (2024)
Acrylic paint
19.5 x 19.5 x 19.5 cm
Reclaimed No. III (2024)
Acrylic painting medium
52 x 23 x 5 D cm
Reclaimed No. II (2024)
Acrylic paint
72 x 24 x 5 D cm
Reclaimed No. I (2024)
Acrylic paint
95 x 26 x 5 D cm
Fractured (2024)
Acrylic paint
162 x 107 x 2 cm
Katey Smoker (2024), Studios: 2024, installation view, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Sam Roberts.
Katey Smoker
Emmaline Zanelli
Emmaline Zanelli is a multimedia artist living in Tarndanya/ Adelaide on unceded Kaurna Country. Her projects often involve obscure narratives using humour and surrealism combining photography, video, set building, costume and performance for the camera.
These techniques create a framework for Zanelli to explore themes of memory, labour and relationships. Since 2016, Zanelli has been a co-director of South Australian artist collective The Bait Fridge, a multi-arts collective who deliver performances and workshops nationally with a focus on regional/remote and youth collaboration.
In 2021-2022’s Nutritional Index (2021-2022), Zanelli collaborated with artist Kurt Bosecke to interrogate the nutritional value of institutional art collections using the Art Gallery of South Australia as a case study. Zanelli’s work as an ACE Studio Artist in 2024 saw her selected for an exhibition, Magic Cave, with firstdraft gallery in Woolloomooloo. Her most recent work is a short film commissioned by the Adelaide Film Festival and Samstag Museum’s EXPAND Lab program, exhibited at the Samstag during AFF 2024.
Zanelli completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts, ACARTS, South Australia (2015); and a Masters in Photography at Photography Studies College, Victoria (2021). Her work has been screened at Arles Photography Festival, France (2022), and published in the British Journal of Photography (2018). In 2022 she was selected as the winner of The Churchie Emerging Art Prize for her film Dynamic Drills. Her work has been presented by galleries nationally.
Emmaline Zanelli, 2024 Studio Program artists, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Thomas McCammon.
Emmaline Zanelli
ACE 2024 Studio Program Donor Event (2024), Emmaline Zanelli’s studio, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Peter Fong. ACE Studio Open Day (2024), Emmaline Zanelli’s studio, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Lana Adams.
Emmaline Zanelli
Magic Cave
by Bec Gallo
At the core of Emmaline Zanelli’s practice there are bodies putting machines to work, and bodies working in the service of machines.
The body in question is sometimes Zanelli’s, but she often works alongside family members and other communities to test ideas, thresholds, and tensions. In early series from 2015-2018, Zanelli uses the machine of a camera to create images, which are then printed and used as theatrical devices borne by bodies. In Water Meter Reader (2021), Zanelli’s starting point is footage from remote control cameras in drains, used by her father in his work. The machine in this instance is a robot tunnelling into the wet, dark underground, so that bodies don’t have to.
The machine-body relationship comes into focus in Dynamic Drills (20192021) and Crash Factory (2021), video works where Zanelli – whose paternal grandparents emigrated to Australia from Italy – juxtaposes the slick promise of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto with the reality of soft, fleshy, human bodies. Zanelli’s grandmother Mila worked in manufacturing with machines that never switched off; in Crash Factory she works with friends to print a famous Futurist photograph onto hand-made lasagne using squid ink. An image of machinespeed is made slow, malleable, and homely. Perhaps most significantly, the image becomes food. Zanelli undermines the melding of machine and body envisaged in Marinetti’s bombastic prose, instead positing a oneness through shared, intimate, domestic labour and the wetness of ingestion. In Dynamic Drills, Mila and various family members undertake laborious, absurd tasks in a domestic setting to a soundtrack of Futurist texts, rendering the supercharged language of this fascist, technophilic movement flaccid and ridiculous in the face of flawed, complex, relational human reality.
For Magic Cave, presented at firstdraft, Sydney in August–October 2024, Zanelli built an installation using found mass-produced materials. You enter the gallery through rough-cut, layered, black curtains; traffic sounds from Riley Street are audible through the brick walls, reverberating off the concrete floor. An eerie, subterranean atmosphere is palpable. In the centre of the dimly-lit, funnel-shaped gallery is an assemblage of cages and crates. They are structures
you can see through; cubic units knit together in uncomfortable tessellations; an irregular network of enclosed but breathable spaces, connected by modular, bright plastic tubes. They are rigid structures built to house and entertain small, soft bodies – they still contain miniature ladders, wheels, and slings. Striped shadows from bird and hamster cage bars, looming silhouettes of grim animal testing enclosures, and the perspex ghosts of hermit crab enclosures are cast dramatically onto the walls and ceiling. But the plastic connecting tubes act like lighting gels, casting bright, almost festive splashes of colour throughout. The contrast between the luminous tunnel halos and the dungeon-bar shadows amplifies the central conceit of the work: the cages are claustrophobic, but they’re also connected.
Growing up in a small community can feel like this: the proximity is at once claustrophobic and connecting. There’s comfort in knowing and being known by everyone around you, but it can also be utterly stifling. Magic Cave was informed by a series of workshops and a film that Zanelli held with young people in Roxby Downs, a remote South Australian town built to service BHP’s Olympic Dam mine. Claustrophobia also makes sense in this context, where the majority of the adult population works underground. The enormous apparatus of a mine shapes the families whose lives are oriented towards its service. Once again, Zanelli is thinking about bodies and machines at work, and the practical and social implications of these complex interrelations.
About the writer
Bec Gallo is a writer, artist, arts worker, and organiser based on unceded Gadigal land. They research, publish, and make art as part of the collaborative duo Make or Break, and were a founding co-director of Pari, a collective-run space on Darug land. Bec’s writing has been published by platforms including Art+Australia, Vault, Art Collector, Art Guide and Runway. They are currently researching socially-engaged art in the public sphere through the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
– Bec Gallo
Emmaline Zanelli
Magic Cave (2024)
Various pet cages and toys, mouse tunnels, LED lights, DMX controller
6m x 3.4m x 3.8m Courtesy the artist
This sculpture grew from research into the social culture and family dynamics surrounding the mining industry in South Australia, with a focus on youth. Specifically, it responds to Roxby Downs, a town purpose-built in 1988 to service BHP’s Olympic Dam mine, located 600km North of Tarndanya (Adelaide) on Kokatha Country.
Emmaline conducted a series of workshops with young people in Roxby. Influenced by the young people she met and their interests, Magic Cave is an absurdist fantasy interpretation of life underground. Combining feelings of doom and play, materials reminiscent of childhood joy also speak to confinement, confusion and entanglement.
The use of pet enclosures is influenced by the exotic pets Zanelli encountered in Roxby, including macaws, scorpions, a hairless cat and barking geckos. But it also reflects on what it means to possess something precious, and how the personal and domestic are inextricably enmeshed within much broader social systems of economy, labour and value.
Emmaline Zanelli (2024), Studios: 2024, installation view, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Sam Roberts.
Emmaline Zanelli
Emmaline Zanelli (2024), Studios: 2024, installation view, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Sam Roberts.
Studios: 2024
In early 2024, ACE welcomed 5 studio artists: Carly Tarkari Dodd, Abbey Murdoch, Marian Sandberg, Katey Smoker and Emmaline Zanelli. Over the course of 2024, the artists were encouraged to explore, experiment, test and develop their work, with the support of ACE’s Associate Curator, Rayleen Forester, and myself, Artistic Director, Danni Zuvela, as well as a host of visiting curators from across Australia, and around the world.
The artists, all talented early career artists with vastly different modes of practice, arrived at ACE via an array of channels. Two artists, Abbey Murdoch and Katey Smoker, were outstanding recent graduates, selected as part of partnerships in the tertiary sector, while the others were selected by a (highly competitive and un-themed) open call. The resulting Studios: 2024 exhibition brings together five very different contemporary South Australian artists, each having honed their skills in a variety of different modalities over the course of the year.
The resulting Studios: 2024 exhibition is, consequently, an exhibition of 5 separate artists – effectively 5 solos brought together in one room – with the connecting thread being their shared voyage across the year of 2024 in the ACE studios. The exhibition highlights the strength and distinctiveness of the artists’ individual practices – as well as, perhaps surprisingly, revealing some unexpected overlaps, resonances and echoes between their different artworks.
On a purely visual level, the vertical-horizontal form of the grid is asserted in Emmaline Zanelli’s boxy pet cage assemblage, recurs in Marian Sandberg’s pixellated womb structure and finds extensive articulation across Katey Smoker’s suite of paint-based artworks. South Australian contemporary art’s enduring love affair with textiles – radical and otherwise – is lavishly honoured across the plump, silky satin of Carly Tarkari Dodd’s woven jewels, Marian Sandberg’s plushly-upholstered frame and Abbey Murdoch’s polyester lace curtain. And amidst the riotous cornucopia of colour throughout the exhibition, we see the prevalence of a warm, human-flesh-adjacent reddish tone.
At the level of ideas, both Abbey Murdoch and Emmaline Zanelli engage with the notion of “home” within a critique of Australia’s ruthless class system; Zanelli with her warren of exotic pet cages referencing those discarded en masse, sans expired occupants, by the indulged children of the lucrative extractive industries (who themselves live and work in interconnected, underground dwellings), and Murdoch with her immersive, passionate testimony to the parlous state of public housing, told in their own voices with Murdoch’s video acting as witness. There is constant, restless motion in the gallery from Murdoch’s shifting video layers, Zanelli’s flickering lights and Sandberg’s intermittently-thrusting cylinders, lifting and lowering their gleaming, quivering elastics.
But the main similarity between these otherwise-disparate works in Studios: 2024 is their enthusiastic engagement with scale. The size of the ACE main gallery – long and tall, with extra height in places – sets it apart from many other exhibition spaces in Adelaide. The scale of our exhibition space allows for – even encourages – larger works than average, while the Studios program provides a space to grapple with and house sizeable works-in-progress. As in past Studios exhibitions in this gallery, the 2024 Studios artists have responded to the ACE opportunity for larger artworks with big, considered works leveraging the contemporary art museum’s addiction to spectacle with proportions designed to impress.
Abbey Murdoch (2024), Studios: 2024, installation view, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Sam Roberts.
In each case, the expansion is not just physical, but also conceptual. Carly Tarkari Dodd’s foray into massive and chunky necklaces and brooches – literally “expanded jewellery”, with metal and precious stones replaced by metres of satin, yarn and polyester fibrefill – sees her deploy scale tactically, the ludicrously outsized form acting to critique the bloated excesses of colonial pomp and ceremony as symbolised in the iconic, ill-gotten Crown Jewels of British royalty. The results of Katey Smoker’s investigation into expanded painting fills almost an entire wall with a series of meticulous studies composed solely of paint–or, with even more deconstruction, composed solely of the transparent painting “medium”, (which is the polymer base of any house paint, minus the pigment). Abbey Murdoch’s low-income “living room” installation is a form of expanded cinema, combining activism and social realist documentary techniques with humble found materials. Emmaline Zanelli’s towering conglomerate of micro-worlds embraces the vertical dimension, but also expands the idea of who might be an implied spectator into the non-human. And Marian Sandberg has created a pulsing, pixellated 6m uterus at the precise moment in world and Australian political history (see: Trump; overturning of Roe v Wade; 2024 QLD State election; narrowly-defeated Adelaide antiabortion bill) when reproductive justice is again a site of struggle, and when wombs, again, need to be assertively taking up political space.
The Studios: 2024 exhibition represents the culmination of a year’s sustained activity in the ACE studios by some of the most promising artists in contemporary SA today: a tour de force of material and conceptual rigour, and a celebration of multidimensional expanded practice.
Acknowledgements
Carly Tarkari Dodd, Abbey Murdoch, Marian Sandberg, Katey Smoker and Emmaline Zanelli for their openness and generosity throughout the year in developing this exhibition. Thank you for contributing such thoughtful and critical artworks for Studios: 2024. Thank you to writers Coby Edgar, Elvis Richardson, Pia van Gelder, Troy-Anthony Baylis and Bec Gallo for contributing such engaging responses to each artists’ practice. Thank you to Harriet Culbertson for your incredible design expertise in bringing this, ACE’s first major digital publication, into life. Thank you to Lana Adams, Sam Roberts and Morgan Sette for your beautiful documentation images which we are thrilled to share here. Thank you to our fantastic install team headed by Olivia Kathigitis; Pantelis Georgiadis, Jennifer Mathews, Tahlia Hieatt, Thom Buchanan and Michael Kearney. Thank you to the entire team at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental; Harriet Culbertson, Louise Dunn, Rayleen Forester, Sally Francis, Grace Marlow, Ava Viscariello and Jake Yang, for your incredible support and contributions towards the delivery of Studios: 2024.
Published by Adelaide Contemporary Experimental to coincide with Studios: 2024, an exhibition held at ACE from 9 November – 14 December 2024.
ISBN 978-1-875751-42-6
ACE Studio Program
ACE is home to fully-supported, rent-free CBD-based studios for South Australian artists.
The ACE Studio Program provides professional development opportunities, including studio visits with Australian and international curators; participation in live programs; mentorship by ACE staff; and prominent profiling and promotional opportunities.
It is the only program of its kind in the state and is an invaluable pathway for artists to gain national recognition. Working as part of a cohort of fellow artists, the Studio Program gives residents the space to experiment with their practice and grow their professional careers.
ACE’s Studio Program would not be possible without Creative Australia, Arts South Australia and the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. ACE is committed to building pathways for South Australian artists across Australia, demonstrated by our partnerships with Helpmann Academy, Adelaide Central School of Art and firstdraft, Sydney.
It is also supported by the generous contributions of the Studio Program Donors:
Anton Andreacchio, Jane Ayers, Sally Ball, Candy Bennett, James Darling AM, Dr Alex Grant, Amanda Harkness & Karen Barrett, Thomas Lambert, Pam & David McKee AO, Jane Michell, Amanda Pepe, John Phillips, Louise Rigoni, Marian Sandberg, Tracey Whiting AM.
ACE Studio Open Day (2024), Abbey Murdoch’s studio, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Lana Adams.
About ACE
Located in Adelaide’s iconic Lion Arts Centre precinct, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE) is South Australia’s leading independent contemporary arts organisation, proudly supporting artists to imagine, develop and showcase art on Kaurna Yarta (Kaurna Country).
Established through the merger of the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CACSA) and the Australian Experimental Art Foundation (AEAF) in 2017, ACE builds upon the legacy of over 100 years of leading experimental arts activity in South Australia.
Through exhibitions, studios, live programs, education and professional development opportunities, ACE is a space for artists and audiences to explore, reflect on and connect with contemporary and experimental art.
Lion Arts Centre
North Terrace (West End)
Kaurna Yarta Adelaide SA 5000
+61 8 8211 7505 ace.gallery
Opening Night: Yucky (2024), event documentation, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Thomas McCammon.
