Beyond Surface

Sullivan+Strumpf

Bimonthly Publication

Oct / Nov / Dec 2025

COVERS

Polly Borland No. 1, 2025, Chromogenic hand print, Kodak

Endura colour metallic silver halide paper (obsolete), 61 × 79 cm.

Photography Bronwydd Kidd

INSIDE BACK

Julia Gutman, no speck so troublesome as self, 2025, discarded clothes, linen, old curtain, woolen blankets, and embroidery thread, 193 × 250 cm.

Photography by Kai Wasikowski.

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In this issue, we bring together artists whose practices draw us into a deeper engagement with the tactile language of material. From thread stitched and marble carved, to readymades assembled and mirrors finger-painted, the diverse processes explored across these pages invite us to reflect on what lies beneath, between, or just beyond reach.

Through process, material becomes more than medium. It becomes a mode of thinking, a method of remembering, a form of communication shaped by the hand and guided by intent.

Jennifer Higgie considers Julia Gutman’s practice as one replete with metaphorical potential, revealing how fabric and memory are bound together, and how our lives are inextricably woven with those of others. We are honoured to welcome Alair Pambegan to Sullivan+Strumpf, introduced by his friend and collaborator Tony Albert. A Wik and Kugu artist from Aurukun, Alair’s work sustains cultural memory while illuminating stories of the recent past, carried forward through material form. In Where Matter Speaks, Kanchana Gupta, Alex Seton and Gregory Hodge join Yvonne Wang in conversation ahead of their exhibition in Singapore. Their conversation turns to the behaviours of matter, with a shared belief that material holds agency, and that process can be an act of listening.

Newly represented Jakarta-based artist Ella Wijt reflects on the architectures of care that emerge from domestic and natural worlds. Interviewed at her home studio by Astrini Alias, we glimpse a practice shaped by stillness and sensitivity to the fragment. Yvette Coppersmith offers a symbolic theatre of self through character and myth. In a different register, Lindeman’s exhibition reflects the absurdities of the art world back upon itself through new readymades and a suite of his iconic, finger-painted

Regression Paintings.

We have settled into our re-opened gallery in Singapore’s heritage neighbourhood of Tiong Bahru and are feeling grateful for the embrace of the local community. Friend and photographer Phillip Huynh, captures five essential neighbourhood spots, offering a guide for visitors to explore the area, just beyond our doors.

Finally, Polly Borland’s Puffs closes the year at our Naarm/Melbourne gallery, which introduces a new cast of characters shaped in wood, marble and resin. As Oliver Giles writes, the Puffs, more than anything, force reflection on the feeling of existing.

We hope these pages invite you to linger and consider the questions that arise when surface gives way to substance. A reminder of the inextricable relationship of meaning and material, and of concept and process.

Happy reading, Jo + Urs

Myriad Stars Between Myriad Worlds is primarily concerned with the flux of being, the flow of time and the ceaseless rising and falling of all phenomena. We could call this time but I prefer the term ‘impermanence’ which is a fundamentally Buddhist understanding. The philosophies of Buddhism and Taoism are central to my work. It is through these ancient spiritual beliefs that I find my deepest connection to my Chinese ancestry. The practice of Ch’an (Zen) gives me an anchor to understand my existence and belonging. Over the millennia, Chengdu was central to development of both Taoism and Ch’an Buddhism. For these reasons it is especially poignant that my first solo exhibition in China is in Chengdu.

As many of us who have diasporic backgrounds, I’ve struggled with a sense of belonging in my adopted homeland. Australia in the 1960s was a predominantly colonial Western society that had not embraced its underlying multicultural fabric, which it now celebrates as one of its greatest cultural virtues. Living as a diasporic Chinese person, I felt suspended between worlds, none of which seemed fully substantial and which fuelled my early work. I went through a period of deep examination, testing my difference against a Western horizon. As my work evolved, I moved from seeking belonging to realising that I am not neither wholly Chinese nor Western.

Ch’an Buddhism became the perfect spiritual framework for me. It not only linked me in a very personal way to my Chinese origins, but it encouraged me to develop my initial question of “Who am I?” into the more profound “What is the nature of existence?” My work as an artist is a surrender to forces that are simultaneously greater than any individual life but in which each individual is inextricable to. These forces are what I call cosmos, which is the length, breadth and depth of everything that has existed, exists right now and will exist in the future. Cosmos is a vast web that connects everything and is something that we can never fall out of. All phenomena are the result of all of history and time converging into this present moment. Through this exploration I now understand that we are all intrinsic to cosmos. There has never been a single moment of not belonging - we are all part of this vastness and beauty of experience.

The interdependency of humanity and nature inspires me to use the elemental in my work. I live in a rainforest in the countryside of Australia, far away from any major city. Bushfire, drought and flood is deeply embedded in the Australian experience and is innate in my work. This is how I have come to use the elements of fire and water as my materials. I relinquish my ego in order to participate with the rain and fire as it does its work with the wood, inks, metal and paper I use. It is a meditative process that quietens the mind - the habitual thoughts and everyday opinions are dropped, making way for the silence in our souls to receive the wonder and beauty of the world. My job as an artist is to allow people an opportunity to attune to that inner quiet in order to experience, however briefly, the exquisite intimacy of their own belonging to that which is greater: cosmos. It has taken the vast history of time for this moment to arise. Miraculously each life contains the whole of history and yet in this present moment in which we are genuinely inhabiting our lives is utterly unique and will never come again. That is the paradox of myriad worlds.

Lindy Lee: The Myraid Stars Between Myraid Worlds

Time:

2025.08.30-11.30

Location:

A4 Art Museum, Building 21, Mountain-top Plaza, Luxetown, No.18, Section 2, Lushan Avenue, Tianfu New Area, Chengdu, People’s Republic of China

Artist:

Lindy Lee

Curator:

Dr. Shen Qilan

Producer:

Sunny Sun

Fine Line by Jennifer Higgie

Borland Beautiful, Monstrous, Human Puffs by Oliver Giles

Lindeman Humour is Key by Elisabeth Finlay

Introducing Alair Pambegan “Not to give away, not to die away” Alair Pambegan carries the flame of our ancestors by Tony Albert

Matter Speaks Yvonne Wang in conversation with Kanchana Gupta, Alex Seton and Gregory Hodge

Expands to Tiong Bahru, Singapore

Local’s Guide to Tiong Bahru Photography by Phillip Huynh

Ella Wijt Interview by Astrini Alias

by Lily Beamish

Last Word with Myles Russell-Cook by Elsa Bryant

QUICK CURATE

Ayas Larasati

WE LIVE IN A WORLD SHAPED by constant change, shifting landscapes, and events that often feel overwhelming. Moving to Melbourne, beginning a new role at Sullivan+Strumpf, and experiencing the passing of a loved one has reminded me how fragile life can be. Amidst such turbulence, I have come to recognise the necessity of stillness to create space to reflect and find presence.

From this stillness arises a shift in perspective: new ways of seeing, deeper understanding of experience, and an awareness of life’s contradictions. In this Quick Curate, I reflect on programs and exhibitions presented in the last 12 months. Together they bring forward artists whose practices span quietness and chaos, silence and expression. Some works embrace stillness, offering completeness and presence, while others revel in intensity, layering expression, protest, and upheaval.

Earlier this year in Melbourne, we presented Lindy Lee’s The Silence of the Elemental, which reframed silence as a profound space of release, and Kirsten Coelho’s The trees are mended. That winter is washed away, where porcelain vessels evoke both the permanence of material culture and the impermanence of memory and time. In Sydney, Glenn Barkley’s experimental idiocy unfolded from personal loss and caregiving, interwoven with cultural and political shifts.

Jemima Wyman’s Atmospheric Disturbances considered protest smoke as a contemplative weather event, while the celebrated Naminapu Maymuru-White’s Guwak – the ancestors resonated with spiritual depth, bridging life, death, and the universe.

These exhibitions remind us that art exists within the continuum of human experience, between silence and noise, order and chaos, loss and renewal. In their contrasts, they invite us to remain open to the fullness of life.

AYAS LARASATI, GALLERY ASSOCIATE

Jemima Wyman, Haze 19 (curtain), 2024 custom-printed chiffon (100% polyester with 100% polyester thread). Photography Jessica Maurer.

Naminapu Mymuru-White, Guwak the ancestor s, 2025, installation view, Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney. Photography Aaron Anderson

Coelho Ithaca , 2021

45 pieces porcelain, satin and matte white

Glenn Barkley nowthenwhen, 2024 earthenware

57 × 37 × 2 7 cm

Naminapu Maymuru-White Milŋiyawuy, 2025 bark painting 134 × 58 cm

Jemima Wyman Haze 22, 2024 hand-cut digital photographs 125 × 100 cm

Lindy Lee Unbounded , 2024 Chinese ink, fire and rain on paper 200 × 140 cm

Lindy Lee

Above the Heavens (Series Tenderness of the Ten Directions), 2024 mirror polished stainless steel 120 × 25 cm

au Yvette Coppersmith

Volle Fond

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. It leaves only ash behind.”

— Madeline Miller, Circe

In her reimagining of the myth of Circe, Madeline Miller speaks of the brief and luminous encounter between the exiled sorceress and Odysseus. It is this same meeting ephemeral, transformative, and layered with an emotional complexity that Yvette Coppersmith evokes in Volle au Fond, her latest exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf Naarm/Melbourne. In this multidisciplinary body of work, Circe becomes a lens for Coppersmith’s own creative inhabitation: a character through which she builds a visual, performative world of female agency, and wit.

Unlike many mythological retellings that foreground trauma or struggle, Coppersmith’s Circe exists in a space of poetic reconstruction: simultaneously ancient and timeless, theatrical and introspective. The phrase Volle au Fond is an invented expression, loosely and playfully translated from non-standard French as “flight to the bottom” — a poetic oxymoron that carries both levity and the suggestion of descent and transformation.

With this body of work, Coppersmith demonstrates her creative breadth.

Her elegant, enigmatic approach spans portraiture, still life, landscape, abstraction and now, moving image. In Volle au Fond the painting Assise près du rivage (2025), the figure is seen from behind, perched on a dune, steadying herself with one hand and gazing out to sea. There is a moment of presence and peace, enticing the viewer to sit and await the unfolding of time, of mythic narrative, of modern history. The work’s grainy application and gentle hues afford a timeless quality that transposes the scene to an indeterminate era. I regard Tressant le laurier

d’Aiaia (2025), as an instrumental work in the way in which it connects a modest scene to thoughts of wider acts of creation.

The exhibition also includes the actual tapestry, Le laurier de la baie d’Aiaia (2025), produced in collaboration with the Australian Tapestry Workshop. Hanging from a bronze cast of a branch, it recalls the quiet absorption of Grace Cossington Smith’s The Reader (1916), in which the subject is immersed in solitary creative pursuits.

The show delights in the crosspollination of materials. Each painting features a detachable ornament which becomes a wearable talisman, created with jeweller Nadine Treister — objects that exist both within and beyond the picture frame. A brass bivalve mollusk, a golden vessel, a tassel of beads: each a pendant to adorn the painting and the body.

Coppersmith is lauded for portraiture, having won the Archibald Prize in 2018 with a self-portrait in the manner of George Washington Lambert (1873–1930), the society portraitist and war artist. Despite the homage, the piece is resolutely hers: less flamboyant, more subtle in hue, with a quiet intensity of gaze. Her female figures are self-possessed and singularly captivating — a marked departure from

historical depictions of women. Yet Coppersmith’s interest lies less in asserting a gendered narrative and more in exploring characters that offer a framework for imaginative, immersive world-building. In 2023, Coppersmith’s show Carnelian, at the Jewish Museum of Australia, was inspired by Bella Chagall—the writer, wife, and muse of Marc Chagall. While its flowers and costumes evoked Bella as muse, the show also spoke to Bella as a creative force — a writer subsumed by the male genius. It marked a period of technical experimentation for Coppersmith, visible in both fine and looser, more expressive brushwork. Her fascination with costume as a shapeshifting device is vitally evident.

“In kindergarten I was enamoured by the box of ballet costumes,” she recalls. “As a child that loved playing dress-ups and imaginary games, there was a point where other children stopped playing dress-up. I never did, and I still seek out people to perform with.”

When pressed about her influences, Coppersmith is hesitant—they are broad, atmospheric, and intuitive. She recalls being captivated as a child by a televised performance of The Mikado by the English National Opera, drawn to its theatricality and black-and-cream palette. A landscape by Arthur Murch (1902–1989), spotted at a friend’s house, lingers in her mind for its texture. Pierre Puvis De Chavannes’ Young Girls by the Seaside (1879) is a touchstone for this exhibition, evoking a similar connection to classical myth and mood.

Coppersmith has made a silent film closely linked to the paintings in Volle au Fond—in turns playful, poetic, mythic. Performing the role of Circe herself, she appears draped as a siren — at times alone in the landscape, at others in humorous ensembles with her cast of performers. Coppersmith reflects that “I love finding a character that allows me to inhabit a creative space in a way that extends my own persona. Also thinking about what kind of energy the character helps channel —  what it can bring into the work. As any actor will tell you, having a character is liberating. But to have any authenticity, it’s interpreted through you and your experiences.”

The cinematic influence here, to a degree, is a 1937 archival film of the Ballet Russes playfully performing on the NSW coast, filmed by Ewin Murray-Will. Its serenity, elegance and theatrical spirit informed not only the silent film in Volle au fond, but to some extent the paintings. In this work, Coppersmith echoes Miller’s Circe as a woman sustained — rather than

EXHIBITION DATES

25 Sept – 25 Oct 25

constrained — by the landscape. Though exiled to the island of Aiaia by her father Helios, Circe becomes a liberating figure through whom Coppersmith inhabits a richly imaginative realm.

The film provides a narrative component for the myth, while being a basis for the paintings via film stills. Through stylised gesture, spontaneous smiles — contrasted with the occasional unwieldy movement — she subverts the image of the idealised celluloid heroine. A made to order character as Coppersmith casts herself in the title role, playing the comic aspects of silent film and providing a foil for the more earnest painted depictions, Coppersmith further layers the filmic experience and expands its interpretation of Greek myth via the portal of channelling a Yiddish silent film actress — where a poem, commissioned and written by Hinde Burstin, is recited in a lilting soundtrack to the show. After all Circe was known for her singing voice.

It is a meditation on Circe’s loom, her island, that perhaps offers an understanding of how Volle au Fond relates to a sense of transition for the psyche. Where the mythic island of Aiaia is a reprieve for both Odysseus, and the viewer from the ravages of violence –

The world has sunk into gloom And is drowning in hostility (hatred) In blood-thirstiness And ugly war.

So it was truly good luck That I was exiled

For in the quiet, my soul Blossomed.

Translation

of Yiddish poem by Hinde Burstin

Attending to the question of self-portraiture, Polish curator Tomasz Jeziorowski has remarked: “To recreate one’s own appearance is a pretext for a sort of psychological vivisection … But we discover only as much as we are permitted to.” In this way, Volle au Fond unfolds not only as a meditation on myth, but as a symbolic theatre of the self. Through Circe, Coppersmith constructs a world of solitude, imagination and light — at once intimate and expansive, a safe harbour for renewal.

A Fine

Line Julia Gutman

Words

Suspended from ceilings, hung high on walls or digitally animated, a cast of characters – alone or together, formed of thread, cloth and paint –intertwine, separate and regroup; dream, tumble and embrace; leap high, curl up in a chair; gaze into a mirror. Created from re-purposed fabric donated to the artist by her family and friends, Julia Gutman’s patchwork world is rich in both texture and gesture.

A FINE LINE, THE TITLE OF GUTMAN’S new exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf, is both a literal and metaphorical description of the artist’s approach. She often creates expanded self-portraits, appearing in various — and sometimes multiple iterations of herself, isolated or with people she’s close to. While she literally creates her images from the fine lines of fabric and stitch, she also mines the delicate boundaries between the self and the other; between intimacy and violence, attachment and loneliness.

The artist explains she’s been thinking about lots of different kinds of psychological dualities and using a double self-portrait to play with ideas around the way we attempt to see ourselves, the way that we see others; the ways that we’re kind of always in an active projection. (1)

She elaborates: ‘I guess there’s a nice duality that’s embedded in all of my work, which is made of collected material — so all the figures are made of everyone else. It’s an unstable collective portrait.’ Recently, she’s also been weaving pieces of linen, which she then stretches and paints, ‘so the weave is embedded in the image’. It’s an approach which is also replete in metaphorical potential: our lives are inextricably interwoven with those of other humans.

A Fine Line will also include a large diptych, I’ll be your mirror (for Azazel) (2025), which is created from collaged textiles, embroidery and acrylic paint on linen. It’s a double self-portrait of the artist, naked, her expression sombre, standing back-to-back with herself on brown earth. Linking hands across the divide between two canvases beneath a soft, cloudy sky, in this barren landscape, the artist is circled by what could be a rough line of energy.

1. Unless otherwise mentioned, all quotes from a conversation between Julia Gutman and Jennifer Higgie, 5 June 2025.

2. https://www.sullivanstrumpf. com/exhibitions/ lighting-of-the-sails-echo

Look closely, and the mix of dense stitching, loose threads and sensual swathes of paint evoke both an intense introspection and a visceral sense of flesh and earth.

Despite her facility with the medium, Gutman’s turn to textiles and fabric was relatively recent. As she was growing up, she and her sister were ‘always cutting up jeans and putting safety pins in them and bleaching stuff’, but after studying painting in Sydney, she completed an MA in sculpture at the Rhodes Island School of Design. She was drawn to using textiles ‘as a way of being able to make big objects with the kind of confidence I lacked in the wood shop and the metal shop’. In 2019, she decided to buy a sewing machine. The first thing she made was a quilt for a friend’s new baby and it encouraged her to keep going. ‘Thinking like a painter but using a sewing machine’, the more skilled she became, the harder it was to make what she describes as ‘happy accidents’. At first, she approached using textiles a — given the relationship between sewing, quilting and domesticity — a feminist gesture. Inspired by artists she’s long admired, such as Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin, both of whom employed sewing in their practice to wild, expressive effect, she said: ‘Once you become deeply engaged with a medium, it becomes about the making and the materials and it stops feeling like a political choice and starts becoming an obsession’.    In 2024 — the year after she won the Archibald Prize, with her portrait of the singer-songwriter Montaigne — Gutman expanded upon the possibilities of her medium with a seven-minute animation, which transformed the sails of the Sydney Opera House into a mesmerising portal to another world. A loose interpretation of the myth of Narcissus transported to the Australian landscape, Echo is a story of confronting your shadow: a tale told via a digital rendering of an age-old craft. The artist — in jeans and a striped t-shirt, her hair made from her mother’s scarf, her face created from a hessian sack — gazes into the waves and, on seeing her reflection, falls into the water. She then journeys through various landscapes both oceanic and earthbound, all of which were, again, created from donated fabrics, including denim and silk. Eventually, Echo comes across another version of herself. Initially aggressive, dancing, they are united. Gutman describes it as the most collaborative work she’s ever made; a close friend, Angus Mills, composed the jazzy, dreamy score, and another directed the dance. Gutman described the animation as

bringing together her ‘interests in narrative, materiality and the psychological in a story that I hope can be simultaneously personal and universal.’ (2)

Whether in fabric or film, Gutman’s portraits of the everyday are tempered with something magical: a search for meaning via the intimate, and infinite, possibilities of human interaction. When I spoke to her in mid-June she was deeply immersed in creating works for her new show. She sent me photographs of her studio, the floor scattered with scraps of fabric, some woven into loose grids. On the walls she had sketched out various scenarios: a couple embracing as they float through an expanse; two young women, one reclining, the other stroking her hair; the intimation of someone crouched, their hands before them. A stretched weave enlivened with delicate stains of blue paint; a body collaged onto a canvas, fragile beneath faint stars. New images — new worlds — emerging, in the midst of being conjured.

Julia Gutman: A Fine Line Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney

Polly Borland’s Beautiful, Monstrous, Human Puffs

MANY QUESTIONS.THE FIRST IS SIMPLY:

WHAT AM I LOOKING AT?

That is difficult to answer. In her latest series, Puffs, Borland has taken human figures and ballooned them into animal, and even alien, forms. One of them, Bunny, stands upright on two legs and has the arms of a person, right down to the knuckles on its hands. But balancing on its human shoulders is a featureless face riven by a gash and topped with two towering growths (ears?) bulging like sacks of potatoes. Among the other four Puffs, there are legs that end in spherical feet, a neck stretched into a chicken’s wattle and teeth erupting out of faces. Then there is the disconcerting materiality of these sculptures. All of them appear pillowy, but are actually firm, made from wood, marble or resin. This ambiguity human or not, spongy or solid makes it hard to grasp the Puffs’ essence. They are simultaneously beguiling and repellent, occasionally amusing and often poignant. To use Borland’s own words, “they scramble the mind.” (1) Perhaps the only certainty is that they are bodies, which is the core subject of all Borland’s work to date. Borland started her career as a photographer, shooting people who lived on the fringes of society because they were either exalted, like celebrities, or shunned: her book The Babies (2001) offered a look inside the secret world of adults who spend weekends living as infants, including wearing nappies. Since 2010, Borland has stepped away from making portraits of specific individuals and focused on distorting models’ bodies to make her own characters. Rather than being a window into other people’s lives, these works function as mirrors that reflect viewers’ own unconscious fears and desires. Borland first ventured into this Freudian territory with photography:

her Smudge (2010) and Morph (2018) series are portraits of models she swaddled in fabrics until they became unrecognisable, amorphous shapes. Then, in 2020, Borland began scanning her mummified subjects and turning the results into sculptures.

As in some of Borland’s earlier works, elements of the Puffs spark feelings of abjection, the skincrawling sensation of seeing something that makes you aware of the workings of your body. Classic examples of encounters that inspire abjection are touching bodily fluids, witnessing childbirth or glimpsing a corpse.

The pioneering psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva wrote: “The abject confronts us … with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal.” (2)

The Puffs’ blurring of man and beast reminds us viscerally of our own fleshiness, our organs, muscles and fat. This is not new territory for Borland. The Babies caused abjection, as did Smudge. British author Will Self said about the latter:

“They draw one’s attention to the weird squishiness of one’s own genitalia, to the ingress-ability of one’s body, to the anus, to the floppiness of breast or buttock.” (3)

But Borland goes beyond the psychosexual with Puffs. One of them, Slit, is slashed from between its legs all the way up its torso to its chin an act of violence

unprecedented in Borland’s art. You can see both through and inside its body: its peachy skin reaches the edge of the incision, then its insides are red, just like ours. Slit draws attention to our mortality, to the sensation of blood pumping around our own bodies. It makes visible that most personal of feelings while highlighting how it defines our shared humanity.

The Puffs also differ from many of Borland’s earlier figures because they are more human. All of them are rendered in skin tones and some have identifiably human features, like a fist or knee. The fingers of Bunny and Split are clearly defined, making them slightly dollish and especially uncanny. This heightened humanity intensifies the sense of physical fragility the Puffs’ and our own and makes it tempting to ascribe emotions to the figures. Not all of them are as distressing as Slit. To me, there is an ease to the way Chick stands, while Bunny’s cocked fists convey a playfulness rather than aggression. But just as people can reach different conclusions after the same conversation, individual viewers will discern different emotions in each of the Puffs.

Borland’s renown as a photographer means her work is still regularly discussed in relation to other artists working with that medium, but the Puffs also put her in conversation with sculptors both past and present. The inflated breasts and mouths of certain Puffs echo the art of the late Alina Szapocznikow, who made casts of her body into surreal lamps. Their dimply finish recalls bronzes by William G Tucker, who also evokes humanity from the skin-like surfaces of his not-strictly-human forms.

Borland’s contemporaries include the Canadian sculptor David Altmejd and the Romanian artist Andra Ursuta, both of whom also fuse the human figure with other creatures or objects to explore vitality and decay. But Altmejd and Ursuta’s hybrids often hint at a merging of man and machine, so look to possible futures, at what mankind might become. In contrast, Borland’s Puffs feel almost primordial, an investigation into where humanity has come from and the base instincts that linger inside us.

EXHIBITION DATES

20 Nov – 20 Dec 25

Polly Borland: PUFFS

Sullivan+Strumpf Naarm/Melbourne

In this, they are closer to the sculptures of PakistaniAmerican artist Huma Bhabha, whose work similarly references the past and primeval emotions.

The Puffs, like many of Bhabha’s figures, also interrogate the history of statues, questioning who gets to be immortalised on a plinth and why. This is most explicit in Froggy, which is Borland’s first sculpture in marble, a material that calls to mind the statues of Ancient Greece. These associations are strengthened by the fact that three of the Puffs are missing arms, as if

they were broken off in mysterious circumstances in the mists of time, like those of the Venus de Milo. However, while the Puffs play with history, they are most connected to the present. More than anything, Borland’s Puffs force reflection on the feeling of existing inside a body in the moment we encounter them. For some viewers that will be a sudden, shiverinducing awareness of the beat of their heart, for others the rhythm of their breath or warmth of their skin.

1. Interview with Polly Borland, 12 August 2025.

2. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University Press, 1982), 12.

3. Alex Chomicz, Polymorphous, documentary, 27 min., 45 sec., at 2:52-3:30, www.vimeocom/69866493.

The Puffs are fundamentally a reminder of our own physicality right now, with all the beauty and terror that involves.

Perhaps it is worth flipping the original question: “what am I looking at?” That framing puts the focus on the Puffs, suggesting there is something definitive to be discovered in them. The power of the Puffs, however, lies in what they provoke in you. They are three-dimensional Rorschach tests that unlock something unique in the unconscious mind of each viewer. A better starting point might be: what do I see in these sculptures, and how do they make me feel?

MICHAEL LINDEMAN IS WELL KNOWN for his witty and wry observations of the art world. He is a keen observer of the affectations and absurdities of the art market and gallery sector, paying close attention to institutional authority and hierarchies. But rather than dismantling institutions, Lindeman’s practice is concerned with an understated critique that has the tenor of what he terms ‘critical mischief’, ‘polite subversion’ or ‘smiling dissent’.

Michael Lindeman

Words by Elisabeth Findlay

30 Oct — 22 Nov 25

Michael Lindeman: Artists Anonymous Sullivan+Strumpf Naarm/Melbourne

LINDEMAN HAS BEEN particularly influenced by the first-generation of Californian conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists such as Tom Marioni, Ant Farm, John Bladessari and Mike Kelly provide models for Lindeman in how to destabilise dominant paradigms. Like these artists, he tackles the inherent paradoxes of an artist adopting an anti-institutional stance whilst at the same time engaging with the art establishment. Lindeman does not shy away from the irony that his critique is embedded within the very structures that he is critiquing. Rather than what he calls ‘shouting from the margins’, he murmurs from within. He is compelled by the question of, ‘how can a contemporary artist maintain cultural traction while sidestepping dominant structures?’

Humour is key to how Lindeman tackles vexed questions of institutional critique. As he casts his discerning eye across the sector, he is deliberately mischievous. With a tongue-in-cheek tone he sends a letter to the Director of the National Gallery of Australia with a bogus

sense of familiarity. Or writes a ‘Career Development Checklist’, with biting to-do points such as ‘spend more time networking rather than making art’. The tone, however, is not accusatory. Instead, Lindeman encourages us to laugh at ourselves, and his in-jokes are politely subversive.    In his latest exhibition, Artists Anonymous, Lindeman zeroes in on the persona of the artist. As the title suggests, the exhibition pivots around the notion of a pseudo group-therapy organisation for artists. The idea was driven by Lindeman’s observation that there was a shortage of open, safe and non-judgemental spaces where artists could discuss the roller coaster of a visual arts career. The touchpoint for the exhibition is a performance (a first for Lindeman) that includes a range of characters: Mrs Kokerspaniels an elegant European lady working toward her first exhibition; Gary the Plumber who is now employed by Lindeman’s side hustle business called Duchamp Plumbing; and Dr Philpott who is a psychotherapist who creates impasto

paintings. This cast of characters brings to life the stereotypes and strangeness of the art world that Lindeman has observed over his career.

At the entrance to the exhibition, visitors are greeted with a large-scale, illuminated, changeable letter sign, akin to those found outside churches or community centres. The sign displays the weekly schedule for the ‘Artists Anonymous’ sessions with topics ranging from ‘weaning off impasto’ on Mondays through to ‘taming the ego’ on Saturdays. Like all successful observational humour, this exhibition contains uncomfortable truths. We quickly recognise and understand the topic for each meeting. There is an uncomfortable familiarity. But Lindeman’s approach is permeated with humour, providing a disarming space for audiences to join with him in laughing and reflecting on the foibles of the art world.

Artists Anonymous sets up a mock meeting circle consisting of eight wooden children’s chairs. The modified chairs are a nod to Duchamp’s readymades but also act as proxies for the diverse range of artists that Lindeman has encountered. Each of the chairs is customised to a particular type of artist at a varying stage of their career. For example, there is a chair for the emerging artist with an L-Plate and training wheels, through to a chair for the artist with ‘hustle fatigue’ with the chair legs shaved away to the point of almost collapse. The absurdity and playfulness of the chairs is amplified by their miniature scale. They conjure up a childlike game but this is a game that is being played by adults.

Text has been a mainstay of Lindeman's practice, again being influenced by the conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout his practice Lindeman has used text and language to entangle the viewer in a complex relationship between looking and reading. Artists Anonymous continues his series of Regression Paintings These paintings have a mirror surface on which Lindeman has added brightly coloured finger-painting. He integrates the finger-painting with texts such as ‘Romantic clouds enveloping mythical notions’ that obliquely call to account the values of the art world. The reflections of the mirrors point to our complicity with these values. The paintings also refer to Freud’s ideas of ‘regression’ as a defence mechanism where we return to our childhood in response to trauma. As such the Regression Paintings hanging alongside of the child sized chairs are placed into a productive dialogue. As audiences leave Artists Anonymous

there are a set of Regression Paintings that invite the viewer to make a choice. Directional signs steer us to exit via a surprising identity category of our choosing. The options we have — oddballs, freaks, misfits, drifters, loners or players, big shots, posers, hustlers, pirates — are hardly inspiring or aspirational. But this exit does underscore that sometimes personas are forced upon us, and we must make a choice and play the game.

So how can an artist sidestep dominant structures and maintain cultural traction? In many ways the question that Lindeman poses continues to present an intractable problem. Several generations

of artists have made what have been referred to as ‘escape attempts’, only for institutional hierarchies and mores to continue to ensnare them. But that does not mean that the question is not worth asking. In this courageous and levity-filled exhibition Lindeman pushes us to at least acknowledge the eccentricities of the art community. As an insider his observational humour is sharp and authentic. This is not an accusatory critique but rather Artists Anonymous asks us to pause, to knowingly smile and at the least acknowledge some of the inherent absurdities of the art world.

Pambegan

Not to givenotaway, to die away

Alair Pambegan carries the flame of our ancestors

In the distinctive red, white and black ochre from his Country in Cape York Peninsula, Alair Pambegan continues custodianship of cultural narratives that were once illustrated by his father’s work. Through defined linework and ever-more signature choice of pigment, Pambegan’s paintings remember Flying Fox Story Place, 2002 – 2003 made by his father, the late Arthur Koo-ekka Pambegan Jr. Pambegan progresses his responsibility to preserve cultural memory while creating compelling works that also reveal knowledge of the more recent past.

Ahead of his inclusion in the 5th National Indigenous Art Triennial: 'After the Rain' at the National Gallery of Australia, friend and collaborator, Tony Albert, introduces us to the artist.

Flying Fox Story Place, 2002 – 2003 represents Kalben, a site on Tompaten Creek near its junction with the Watson River, south of Aurukun.

The Kalben narrative follows two young brothers undergoing initiation rites. Forbidden from eating bats, the brothers broke this taboo when they killed and cooked hundreds of the mammals in a kup-mar (ground oven). The bats then punished them by carrying them up into the night sky. The brothers remain there as two black patches in the Milky Way, reminding Wik-Mungkan people of the importance of respecting cultural lore.

Arthur Koo-Ekka Pambegan Jr, Wik-Mungkan people, Queensland Australia 1936 – 2010, Flying Fox Story Place 2002 – 03, Carved milkwood (Alstonia muellerana) with synthetic polymer paint and natural pigments, 15 components: 250 × 900 × 35cm, Collection Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, © Estate of the artist.

Newly represented by Sullivan+Strumpf, Alair Pambegan emerges as a vital and powerful voice in contemporary Australian art. A proud Wik and Kugu man from Aurukun in Far North Queensland, Alair’s practice is deeply embedded in custodianship, drawing on the cultural and ancestral knowledge passed down through generations particularly from his late father, Arthur Koo’eka Pambegan Jr. (1936–2010), a revered artist, senior lore man, and founding figure of the Wik & Kugu Art Centre.

Arthur’s presence continues to shape the cultural and artistic life of Aurukun. Through his totemic sculptures and richly textured visual language, he helped bridge ceremonial tradition and contemporary practice. As a mentor, storyteller, and leader, Arthur’s work was a conduit between past and present, and his legacy remains a living force in the art and identity of his community. For me personally, Arthur was also a cherished friend and teacher. Our friendship and artistic collaborations

not only shaped my understanding of Aurukun but also laid the foundation for an enduring relationship with his son, Alair. A relationship that has deepened my appreciation of the strength and continuity of Wik and Kugu culture.

Alair’s work carries this inheritance with both reverence and originality. His sculptures and paintings honour the weight of ancestral knowledge while pushing into new conceptual and formal territory. He brings customary designs and sacred stories into dialogue with contemporary practice, affirming his role not just as a cultural custodian but as an artist actively reshaping how these narratives live and breathe today.

His inclusion in the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT9) at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art marked a pivotal moment in his career. There, Alair’s striking installation Kalben transformed the entrance to the gallery. Composed of 107 carved milkwood forms suspended with bush string, the work reinterprets the ancestral Flying Fox story from his country. Its rhythmic red, white, and black bands recall traditional Winchanam clan body-painting designs, merging the spiritual and ceremonial with contemporary spatial experience. Through Kalben, Alair demonstrated his ability to

command scale and atmosphere, inviting audiences into a world grounded in lore yet boldly reimagined.

Most recently, as Artistic Director of After the Rain, the fifth National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia, I was proud to include Alair’s work within the curatorial vision. His participation in this landmark exhibition signals a major progression in his practice and recognition of his unique voice. This new commission, his most ambitious work to date, builds upon his inherited stories of Kalben (Flying Fox) and Walkaln-aw (Bonefish), expanding their form and meaning. Alair’s presence in After the Rain echoes the inclusion of his father, Arthur, in the first National Indigenous Art Triennial (Culture Warriors, 2007), poignantly linking two generations of artists and leaders across time.

Alair’s journey from community art centres to major national exhibitions reflects a career defined by both cultural responsibility and artistic innovation. His long-standing relationships with curators, institutions, and artists (including my own) have ensured that he remains deeply grounded in Aurukun while engaging with wider contemporary dialogues. Represented now by Sullivan+Strumpf, Alair’s practice enters a new chapter, one of expanded visibility, critical engagement, and creative evolution.

The phrase I have chosen to frame this introduction, “Not to give away, not to die away”, comes from Arthur Pambegan. These words embody a powerful philosophy of cultural preservation. For Arthur, and now for Alair, cultural knowledge is not a commodity; it is a sacred trust to be protected, respected, and carried forward. This ethos lies at the heart of Alair’s art and leadership, asserting the strength and resilience of Wik and Kugu identity in a rapidly shifting world.

I’m honoured to welcome Alair to the vibrant and visionary team at Sullivan+Strumpf. As an artist, storyteller, and custodian, he brings with him a lineage of knowledge and a future of possibility.

Where Matter Speaks

In conversation with Yvonne

Wang

and

Kanchana Gupta, Alex Seton, Gregory Hodge

Across four time zones, Kanchana Gupta, Alex Seton, and Gregory Hodge came together online with Yvonne Wang ahead of their exhibition Seeing Through Matter at Sullivan+Strumpf, Singapore. Their conversation turned to process and material, revealing a shared conviction: matter is never inert. It charts its own course, shaping meaning as much as the artist’s hand. In scorched lace, carved marble, and layered paint, material steps forward as collaborator — redirecting perception, unsettling intention, and opening space for unanticipated encounters.

YW When you are making a work, how do you decide when to guide the material and when to let it take the lead?

KG The way I work with material is always a negotiation — between its inherent tendencies and my own intentions. Each surface has its temperament: jute yields one way, while lace, stickier and more resistant, behaves differently when I pull the paint skins. Colour, layering, and combinations are mine, but texture and pattern follow the material’s lead. That balance — the sweet spot—between intention and surprise is what I look for.

GH For me, material discovery happens in real time — both in the studio and in the act of painting. I’ve developed a lot of facility and control with acrylic — its flexibility, the way it shifts from thick to thin — and I’ve been adapting and even inventing tools to make marks that mimic other materials. But there’s always a slippage: I think I know what the result will be, and then it turns out differently. That’s when the material comes to the fore.

YW Building on Greg’s point about material discovery, Alex, this is your first time working with Portuguese pink marble — how did that process unfold?

AS This pink marble from Estremoz, Portugal, is extraordinary — older, denser, and tougher than any stone I’ve used before. Its durability, colour, and markings created effects I hadn’t encountered: leathery folds, fleshy striations, white bands and circles, peppery spots. Unlike past works, I let the material lead. The stone’s toughness even destroyed tools, yet from the moment I saw

its colour I knew it would resonate. Stepping back from imposing too much concept and allowing the marble to surprise me has been incredibly satisfying.

YW Greg, have there been moments where paint has surprised you in a similar way?

GH I’ve been thinking a lot about light almost as something to excavate. In my recent Paris show, it crystallised: light wasn’t something added but something already within the surface. I start by laying it down, veiling it, then working back to reveal it — like uncovering something buried. That discovery, unplanned, has anchored every work over the past months, especially in the shift from pure abstraction to more image-based paintings.

YW You’ve worked with acrylic for a long time. Why do you think it’s only now that this idea of excavation has started to pull you in?

GH I think it’s partially because I’ve been stubborn with acrylic, working with it exclusively for over a decade. In that time I’ve built a language with the material — my studio often feels like a lab, experimenting with different processes. That commitment has let me stretch its possibilities and given me confidence: stepping out of abstraction doesn’t feel risky because I know what acrylic can do.

YW Kanchana, your practice has involved many different materials, but lace feels especially charged in your recent work. What about it has surprised you?

KG Almost every aspect of lace has surprised me. Just when I think I understand it, a new variation behaves differently. I first worked with machine-made lace — French, Japanese, Korean — each with distinct textures and patterns. Handmade lace proved less successful: its thicker threads absorbed more paint, and when burned, the patterns disappeared rather than sharpening. Colour, too, shifted outcomes. White oil paint dries fast and flakes when burned, unlike blue or red, which remain viscous. Even pigment chemistry alters results.

YW The slippage between absence and presence runs through all of your practices. What draws you to that interplay?

For

AS In sculpture, absence works differently for me. Most of my works are figurative in the sense that the viewer becomes the figure — their engagement completes the circuit. Sometimes absence is literal, like a missing body in a hoodie or life jacket. In this new series, the forms are fleshy, sloughed-off skins, and their meaning comes through the visceral responses they provoke — sight, touch, even discomfort. My approach is humanist: to create empathy and invite projection.

me, sculpture is about freezing

such moments—folding them into form. Everything happens on the surface: that thin skin of deception, contradiction, and implication.

AS

KG For me, absence works in two ways. First, through process itself: lace and jute on their own hold no mystery, but once burned, layered, and transformed with oil paint, they open another space. I treat paint not only as medium but as subject — it absorbs texture like a mould, concealing and revealing at once. Many viewers don’t even realize it’s oil paint, and that ambiguity is central. Second, through perception: is it lace or not lace, jute or not jute? That uncertainty resists easy identification and connects to my love of abstraction, where meaning shifts with each viewer.

GH In my work, absence appears where edges blur and borders dissolve — subjects bleeding into one another like memory. Thoughts and images overlap, fade, disappear. It’s not complete absence, but a suggestion, a trace of something still there.

YW Your work evokes both the tactility of woven forms and the pixelation of digital screens. How do you see your paintings engaging with the aesthetics and pressures of the digital age?

GH I both lean into and resist the digital. The paintings resemble pixelated images, glitches, or screens, but they’re also intensely handmade. We’re all pushing against how quickly images are consumed today. In a world of speed and saturation, making something by hand is already a statement — painting becomes a refusal of

that velocity. The smaller works in the show demand movement: at ten centimetres you see one thing, at three feet another. That shifting perspective creates a kind of dance, holding attention at a time when it’s harder than ever to sustain.

KG Exactly. That’s what I aim for in my own practice as well: to build textures and surfaces that insist on proximity, drawing viewers in, compelling them to come close, move around, and see something different each time.

AS This lean toward materiality reflects how ephemeral visual experience has become. In my work, I’ve tried to strip things back to the medium’s physicality. Exploring it inside and out has been a lifelong joy. And if I can share even a glimpse of that — the deep reward of long-form activity and contemplation —  that feels like the perfect antidote to short-form digital culture.

YW When I linger with your sculptures, I’m struck by the folds. How do you think about the fold conceptually?

AS Deleuze writes about the fold as a way of thinking about time, space, matter, and subjectivity. For me, sculpture is about freezing such moments — folding them into form. Everything happens on the surface: that thin skin of deception, contradiction, and implication.

Fabric in sculpture is both everything and nothing: it deceives the eye yet carries weight and tension. It’s the most basic exercise yet the most profound device.

I think of the fold through the body — skin as a second skin, where physicality is felt. To slough skin is to separate dead from living, and we shed too easily, too quickly. In an age of conflict and constant noise, these works hold a clarity and presence I want to share. They’re among the quietest yet most poignant anti-war pieces I’ve made.

YW Kanchana, your surfaces seem to carry another kind of violence — the cracks and burns often read as ruptures. How do you think about these marks?

KG I use fire not only as a symbol of destruction, but as a force of transformation. In Hinduism, it is deeply spiritual — the element to which our bodies return. I was drawn to its dual nature: consuming yet liberating, destroying yet regenerating. In my practice, flames

turn paint into something fabric-like. The traces of burning may seem violent, but to me they speak of renewal.

YW That makes me think of memory — marks carried forward in the material itself. How do you see memory in your work?

KG I don’t think of memory metaphorically but materially. Tarpaulin recalls Mumbai, where I lived before moving to Singapore, and encountering it here adds new layers of meaning. Lace takes me back to childhood — my hometown was once a lace-making centre under the British, its missionary schools shaped by that history. Though lace is no longer produced there, the material still carries both colonial history and personal memory.

YW That sense of memory embedded in material also runs through your work, Greg. You’ve explored tapestry as a reference point in painting — how does this shape the way viewers experience it?

GH I came to tapestries as a problem to solve in painting. Their history intrigued me — functional craft, decorative object, and often translations of paintings into textile. I wanted to reverse that, translating tapestry back into painting through contemporary materials. That mimicry fascinates me, how one medium carries the ghost of another. I’ve spent a lot time with The Hunts of Maximilian at the Louvre — twelve

monumental Flemish tapestries that, on the surface, depict aristocratic leisure but beneath suggest something mythic, almost allegorical. That duality — literal and allegorical — fascinates me. In my own work, I try to create similarly open-ended narratives, loosely woven between France and Australia, where meanings may appear fixed yet remain open, allowing multiple stories to unfold.

YW Has working alongside Alex and Kanchana shifted how you approach your own practice?

GH No, it didn’t change how I see my own work, but it was reassuring. Alex and Kanchana approach material with such conviction. What stands out about this show is that it isn’t a “sculpture show” or a “painting show,” but a deep dive into what happens when artists really grapple with the stuff of their studios.

AS What I admire in Greg and Kanchana is their fierce commitment to material — both physical and historical.

KG We’re all deeply connected to art’s histories — whether marble, oil, or acrylic, we’re always in dialogue with those lineages. At the same time, we’re constantly negotiating with our materials, caught in that push and pull. We’re stubborn in the best way — willing to test, fail, rethink, and begin again.

Yvonne is an art writer and the Singapore desk editor for ArtAsiaPacific. She regularly contributes to leading international art publications and collaborates with art platforms to develop curated content. Her writing has appeared in Frieze, Art SG, Asia Art Archive, The Art Newspaper, Art & Market, among others.

As a collector and advocate for the visual arts, Yvonne supports a range of contemporary art institutions and initiatives across the Asia-Pacific. Her involvement focuses on advancing crosscultural dialogue, regional collaboration, and critical discourse—particularly through efforts aligned with her research interests.

She holds an MA in Asian Art Histories from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MSc in Politics and Communication from the London School of Economics.

Expands

into the heritage neighbourhood of

Tiong Bahru

Singapore

Words by Astrini Alias

With a commitment to developing artistic careers and enriching cultural practice in the region, in July 2025

Sullivan+Strumpf reopened a third gallery space in Singapore. Nested in the heritage neighbourhood of Tiong Bahru, this location highlights our expanding diverse international program and profiles important Southeast Asian voices. This milestone re-opening marks the gallery’s commitment and dedication to cultivating important global dialogues and cultural voices.

The new location in Tiong Bahru will create a place for cultural discourse, encourage passion for art and foster a strong sense of community. Forthcoming to Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore is Seeing Through Matter, a presentation of new works by Kanchana Gupta, Gregory Hodge, and Alex Seton, curated by local art historian and writer Yvonne Wang.

a guide to

Tiong Bahru, Singapore

ONE OF SINGAPORE’S OLDEST residential estates, Tiong Bahru is distinguished by its 1930s façades, where streamlined silhouettes, curved balconies, and elongated forms embody the quiet modernity of the era. Amidst its storied market, shaded park, and a constellation of cafés, bakeries, and independent shops, visitors may find themselves lingering between past and present. Pause and savour these five highlights just steps from the gallery.

CASA CICHETI

A trattoria tucked within Tiong Bahru’s blocks, Casa Cicheti feels like a little house of its own, where neighbours become friends over handmade pasta and well-chosen wines. Its menu reimagines timeless Italian recipes with a familiar warmth, mirroring the neighbourhood’s spirit of old and new held closely together.

78 Guan Chuan St, #01 – 41, Singapore 160078

Founded in 2008, Cat Socrates has become a trove of curiosities from books by local writers to whimsical homeware and stationery.

This Tiong Bahru outpost channels the neighbourhood’s creative spirit, offering design pieces and thoughtful objects that make browsing as rewarding as bringing something home.

Once Seng Poh Market of the 1950s, today’s Tiong Bahru Market remains the estate’s beating heart. Freshly upgraded yet deeply familiar, it is where orchids, produce, and hawker classics like Jian Bo Shui Kueh and Loo’s Curry Rice carry forward decades of daily ritual and flavour.

30 Seng Poh Rd, Singapore 168898

By night, the well-loved coffee shop at Moh Guan Terrace, known for its local mee pok by day, transforms into Dirty Supper — a grungy, intimate space where whole-animal cooking and bold cocktails unfold around an open grill. The marble tables and vintage timber nod to the past, even as the menu reinvents itself with each season.

78 Moh Guan Terrace, #01 – 19, Singapore 162078

A Tiong Bahru gem celebrated for its naturally leavened sourdough loaves and hearty brunch plates. Weekend superstars include the sourdough egg tarts, along with favourites like zucchini cake and cheese pretzels. Seasonal coffee specials such as burnt butter sage cold brew or apple cucumber cold brew with shiso foam keep regulars returning, best enjoyed in the bakery’s bright, sunlit back room.

78 Yong Siak St, #01 – 12, Singapore 163078

INTRODUCING

Ella Wijt

We are delighted to welcome Ella Wijt to Sullivan+Strumpf, an artist whose practice is grounded in the quiet persistence of domestic life, bringing together time-worn materials and collected fragments to explore intimate architectures of care.

Based in Jakarta, Wijt’s multidisciplinary practice spans painting, installation, and photography. Drawing from her Indonesian heritage and the sensory rhythms of home, Wijt constructs what has been described as a kind of “material poetics,” where touch, intuition, and narrative coalesce in the language of objects. In this interview Astrini Alias from Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore speaks with Ella Wijt on the layers of her personal art practice to introduce new audiences to her work.

AA I’m looking forward to speaking with you again following your presentation at our new Singapore gallery’s debut exhibition Bricks Laid. Stories Untold. For those who may be new to your practice, how would you describe the spirit of your work and what draws you to the quiet, spacious qualities it often seeks?

EW I am truly grateful to have had my works in the new gallery space in Singapore. The space is beautiful! There are two realms in my art practice that I translate into my work. The first one is nature, which mostly comes from the land surrounding my home and studio. I live in a rural area in Depok, the land is kept wild. This situation constantly draws me to the quiet and the spacious when creating works. I am really inspired by the stillness of nature because when I look closely, the ecosystem is moving in a dynamic way and complements one another. The second realm is the dream/imaginary world. I try to take notes of my dreams, night dreams and day dreams, as often as possible. This realm frees my mind of what does and doesn’t make sense in the waking world. I layer these two realms for my works to give balance to the physical and spiritual. It is important to me that my work offers

a sense of discovery for both myself and the viewer. I want there to be a balance of the familiar as well as the unknown, the mythical and imaginary.

AA You live and work in the outskirts of Jakarta, surrounded by a thriving natural ecosystem, how does your immediate environment shape your approach to your practice, especially in contrast to Jakarta’s dense, fast-paced urban rhythm?

EW It has shaped me as a human being immensely. Before I moved to my current home, I lived in busy cities, in small apartments, with many people. I often felt that I needed to rush all the time and my anxiety was high. I felt I had to constantly keep up with the fast-paced world to be able to survive as an artist. But since I moved here I learned that I could relate more to the pace of nature. The grass and trees have their own pace and they are never in a rush. They grow slowly, even letting parts of them die to be able to make space for new healthy sprouts. I also find that ever since I moved here, I enjoy interacting with people more; that it is possible to communicate with patience. People appreciate it and share more meaningful stories with me. This brings so much life to my work. I became

aware of how important it is to share the spaciousness and healthy ecosystem in my work so that when they look at my work they can find patience and grace.

AA Themes of mythology, womanhood, domestic ritual, and the power of imagination surface consistently in your work. How do these threads come together in your practice, and what kind of emotional or reflective space do you hope they offer to audiences?

EW Ever since I was young, I have heard many Indonesian myths that speak of domestic and sacred rituals. Some are as ancient as earth and some are as contemporary as now. Strangely, most of the stories involve women figures. Some might think that they are merely ghost stories, but they have created very particular rituals surrounding the place and people’s views on what sacredness means. I also grew up in a Christian household and we have many rituals of praying. All these aspects in my life generated curiosity to find who I really am as a woman in my time. I hope my works offer a sense of the sacred, the unknown and the everyday with a foundation of comfort.

AA Process seems central to how your work unfolds. Can you walk us through how a piece might begin for you, and how you know when it’s complete?

EW I enjoy starting a few different pieces at the same time. My mind and heart work best that way. By beginning them at the same time I feel like the works have a conversation with one another and are born together. I move from one piece to another throughout the day. I often leave them alone for a few days because I enjoy looking at every stage of their growth. I learn so much by doing this. It helps me accept my mistakes and appreciate my gifts. I will then go back to them when I feel like I have discovered something about them, I want to give my discovery back to the work. I know the work is done once I sense the fullness in empty spaces.

AA As co-founder of Rumah Tangga, an artist-run space and residency, how has the act of hosting and creating a shared ecosystem of artists shaped your own way of thinking and making?

EW It is very rewarding and challenging. Rumah Tangga (RT) was my childhood dream: a garden, an idea space, a library and a place where everyone can slow down and be free to express themselves. I am beyond grateful to care for RT with my husband, Kurt Peterson. Rumah Tangga is both a private and public space. It is first my home and studio and it also hosts workshops and an artist residency two seasons per year. Our main theme at RT is Land Literacy, which can be translated broadly depending on the practice of each resident artist. We want them to live closely with nature here, look within themselves in relation to nature and discover something organic, genuine and wholesome. I enjoy sharing ideas about the land with artists from different backgrounds. They really bring many inspirations, new stories and perspectives to my art practice and how to care for the land and home. Of course, there are also times that I am so busy taking care of the space and everyone’s needs that I don’t have the energy to be present in the studio. I am still learning to balance this, I am learning to see the act of hosting and facilitating artists as a ritual for me to summon rest so I can receive new, refreshed energy for my work.

AA Looking ahead to Art Jakarta and beyond, what new questions or directions are emerging in your work? What can audiences expect from this next chapter?

EW I am excited as well as quite nervous. I think it is important to be nervous and to have a little doubt in the process of creating. It helps me to constantly check in with myself and ask if my work is true to myself, bringing new questions and wonder, or if it is just a repetition of something that I already know. My work is looking in the direction of more technical questions, to ask how I can work with the same materials in a new way? What I could learn from combining old and new materials together? And the spiritual questions would be: what kind of prayer am I trying to say with my work? How can I care for others through my visions of the work? In all, I have hope that audiences will embrace the unknown and strengthen their relationship with art and nature through my work.

Symbols Ry David Bradley

Words by Lily Beamish

IN RESPONSE TO CONTEMPORARY CENSORSHIP and the erosion of free speech, Ry David Bradley encodes his paintings with a personal system of symbols. These glyph-like forms function as private pictographs, his own evolving visual language the viewer is invited to decode. As Ry guides us through the exhibition, he reveals an unexpected interlocutor: artificial intelligence. When asked, AI delivers readings of the works that come startlingly close to the artist’s intentions. In outsourcing interpretation to a machine, we turn our lens back toward the painting itself, asking not only what does this mean? — but who gets to decide?

The AI parses Bradley’s symbols as basic forms, suspended in flat space, arranged on sharply rendered shelves and its responses begin to spill forth —

IN THE FACE OF RAPID DIGITAL acceleration, artist Ry David Bradley’s practice reads like an epigraph, a transcription of the evolving relationship between the artist and the cyber. Having kept pace with digital advancements for the past 20 years, Bradley has recently taken a step back, reconsidering what it means to work at the forefront of development through the lens of posterity and digital obsolescence.

I met Bradley at Lyon House Museum in August, two days before his exhibition Epoch was set to open. He was calmer than I imagined, with a warm, assured face and kind eyes. It was an unusually sunny day for winter, and we sat in the courtyard to talk about his upcoming show, Symbols at Sullivan + Strumpf. I had entered the gallery full of expectations. Bradley’s prior work existed in a medley of tension; between tactility and digital, the 21st and the historic;

the glitched and the bodily. Previously, his work had unpicked these concepts through large-scale painterly tapestries; chromatic explorations of digital nativism. This work had resonated with those working with the audacity to challenge; with Demna, the former creative director of Balenciaga and the co-founder of Vetements, commissioning a tapestry in 2022.

Bradley’s practice is inherently self-reflexive. Having entered the arts scene in the early 2000s, studying New Media Video and Internet Art, he believed that the digital realm was the modern frontier. Working in conversation with evolving technologies, Bradley quickly carved out a niche responding to the digital moment through tactile forms. Here, his work oscillated between abstraction and figuration, cross-weaving human touch and the digital at every step of the process. As part of this ongoing conversation, Bradley

acted as a translator of sorts, allowing the digital to play the role of both protagonist and antagonist. The goal was not to resolve the dichotomy between digital and material, but rather to embrace the friction and emphasise the tension.

Recently, however, Bradley’s practice has entered an era of self-reflection, a digital and internal meditation of sorts. These ruminations began in Paris, where Bradley immersed himself in the historical, the atelier, the physical. Flecks of this could be seen in his exhibition 2025 BC at Carl Kostyál gallery in London, a sort of glitching or unraveling between the digital and the physical was underway. This was the juncture point, the reckoning between.

“Life is like this great return, and I'm just coming back to where I began, because oil paint is immediate and it lasts for a long time,” Bradley continues. “Digital things, they kind of just go into this ether and don't come out.”

“Ultimately, humans are scatological; we read texture in things and we are exceptionally good at it,” he tells me. “Like with fruit, we can read the surface details incredibly well, how old it is, whether or not it’s edible. We are texture readers deep down as it is tied to survival, and when I was working predominantly in the digital, I wanted people to understand the implicit textures: the layering of the work. But often it felt like showing a dog a picture of dog food. I don’t think it will always be that way though, or maybe it will.”

Bradley’s pivot back to oil painting does not stem from a place of deep nostalgia or a disbelief in the beauty and creativity of the digital. Rather, it arises from a concern: one that questions the longevity of images, the idea that digital works might vanish, overwritten by every adapting software upgrade and digital obsolescence. In saying this, Bradley’s

recent approach to art making does not abandon the digital; rather, it repackages it, folding it into the physical.

In Symbols, the influence of the digital is immediately apparent. Chromatic objects are placed on sleek, shadowed shelves. Unnaturally hovering, frozen in their freneticism, much like the apps on your phone as you hold your finger down. They are chimeric, undeniably contemporary in their fluorescent detailing, a futuristic reimaging of the pictograph or emoji. This work represents a departure from what has come before. What once vibrated is now static, what was intangible is now impasto, what was conceptual is now theoretical. As the digital surpasses, Bradley calls for a pause, for reflection on how we engage with the digital, and what it means to exist within a hyper-digital environment.

“I still have files and AI in my practice, everything has a digital element in some way,” Bradley tells me. “But we are biological creatures in this hugely digital world, and I wanted to make work that responded to that.”

In the modern age, concepts of obsolescence and posterity should befront of mind. We know that traditional mediums of art can survive: we have witnessed the conservation and proliferation of paintings and sculptures for over 40,000 years. Contemporary mediums do not hold the same assurances. Bradley’s work responds to this, asking: what remains if the signal drops, if the batteries die, if the browser vanishes? Within its questioning, its autobiographical thread, a foiled layer emerges, one that questions its own archival impulse, its own penchant for immediacy. Of the now, locked in conversation with the present, it forms its own.

Ry David Bradley, SYMBOLS, 2025, installation view, Sullivan+Strumpf Naarm/Melbourne

THE LAST WORD with

Myles RussellCook

Interview by Elsa Bryant

Myles Russell-Cook is the Artistic Director and CEO of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). Throughout his career, he has curated and produced major contemporary art exhibitions for galleries and institutions both in Australia and internationally.

Forthcoming to ACCA is an ambitious new exhibition series titled Art and Emotion. Led by Russell-Cook with co-curators from ACCA, the first instalment, Are You Lonely Tonight? I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry (3 July – 30 August 2026), explores loneliness in the modern world, bringing together diverse practices and voices in dialogue, offering moments of vulnerability, isolation, and longing. The series will launch with three exhibitions, exploring Loneliness, Rage, and Joy. Featuring works by Sullivan+Strumpf’s acclaimed artists Polly Borland and Jemima Wyman, the series will include new and existing work by international and Australian artists in dialogue, including Callum McGrath, Kayla Mattes, Lucy Liu, Martine Syms, Nicholas Mulally, Patrick Pound, Yoko Ono, as well as many others.

EXHIBITION DATES Fri 3 Jul — Sun 30 Aug 2026 Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry. ACCA Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

In anticipation of this bold and tender series, Sullivan+Strumpf had the pleasure of asking Myles a few questions for The Last Word.

EB Loneliness feels like one of the defining undercurrents of our time, what compelled you to bring this theme into the institutional space right now, and as the first in the Art and Emotion series?

MRC During the pandemic years, there was a lot of conversation about the human need for connection, and the feelings of loneliness we feel in an increasingly disconnected world. But loneliness existed before covid, and it exists after covid. Loneliness is a part of being human, and it intersects with a whole range of other emotions, that don’t delineate in any clear way. Loneliness can be connected to shame, or to bravery, you can be lonely in fame, and lonely in anonymity. There is also the particular type of loneliness artists know too well. Sequestering oneself in the studio. Then there is also the loneliness of being surrounded by people, but not feeling like anyone truly knows you.

Loneliness as a thematic felt appropriate to begin this series, because by looking at what loneliness means, we learn more about connection, and intimacy. We hear about Japan's hikikomori culture, about the male loneliness epidemic, about how we are constantly seeing images that remind us of the loneliness in conflict and war.

I think history repeats itself. And right now, we are seeing scary things around the world. The disappearing of literature, and of people, and of culture. The rise of AI in ways that we can’t imagine. It felt important to start this series on Art and Emotion, because what scares me most these days, is that we are witnessing the birth of a whole new generation of people with so much unchecked trauma, that will manifest for years and years to come.

EB Often thought of in relation to absence, loneliness is usually seen as a lack of connection, of intimacy, of recognition. But artists have a way of turning absence into presence. How do you see the exhibition reimagining what loneliness can mean, or even offer?

MRC Each of the artists are exploring loneliness in different ways. I often say, the antidote to absence is presence, and I think it is useful in this context, because these feelings are universal. They intersect with our understanding of faith, or spirituality, or mental health, of sexuality, of geopolitics, and so on.

The brief is intentionally loose, because to understand the difference between being alone, and being lonely, we need to look at what it means to feel these states in complex ways. I see a lot of artists who are producing work that either helps them to make sense of their own experiences with loneliness, or as a way to understand ancestral or familial stories, about what loneliness means in a transcultural and transhistorical context. The whole premise of the show is to lean into the intersectional overlap between our emotional states. The more we embrace the murkiness of what it means to be human, the clearer things become.

EB Polly Borland’s work has always held this uncanny tension between intimacy and estrangement, it’s at once deeply human, but also unsettling. What drew you to her voice specifically for this exhibition, and what does her presence allow us to see or feel that might otherwise remain hidden?

MRC Polly is an icon, and she represents a part of this story that is so important. The exhibition actually started in Los Angeles, where I was looking at what it meant to be ‘Lonely in LA'. I met with people who travel to Hollywood with a dream to 'make it', but then they described a feeling of just this intense unrelenting loneliness. Spending eight hours a day in a car without any sense of community. Polly is a photographer and a sculptor, and I think her transition from photography is very interesting in this context. As a photographer, she sees the world filtered, and often at a distance, but it is also about capturing ’time’.

It makes me think of Nan Goldin who said ‘I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them

enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost’. For Polly’s work in the show, she is including a really major sculptural piece, and I am so excited by the transition from photography, which always has some inherent ‘link’ to the real world, into sculpture, where she has been able to imagine an entirely new reality, more expressive of an internal state. The sculpture is like a physical, cancerous, manifestation of the internal states of loneliness. It is this stark singular figure, with a bulbous and warped body. The body is a site for trauma. When we are stressed, our hair turns white, which makes me only wonder what stress or loneliness might be doing to our insides.

Polly’s work is just this incredible and daring transformation of that internal psychosphere, into something physical and tangible. To me, she is representing the darkness that comes with an emotion like loneliness, but as a being. Shaped, distorted, flawed.

EB While loneliness is innate to the human condition, there is a common fear and unease tied to admitting it aloud or internally. Personally, I think it can be an incredibly powerful and productive emotion when harnessed. From your lens as a curator, do you think art can be an antidote to loneliness? For the creator and the viewer?

MRC I think art can be many things to many people, and there are definitely artists in then exhibition who have come to art making, because either as a child, or as an adult, they were quite lonely. Loneliness, like all emotions, can be powerful when harnessed into something productive.

But there are so many variables when it comes to understanding an emotional state like this, that there is no point in trying to make it something it isn’t. The show explores what loneliness looks like for different people, and different beings. Loneliness is also not only a human phenomenon. Our pets get lonely, there are plants in the natural world that seek out connection through mycelium networks. There are some works in the show that look at endlings and terminarchs—beings that are, or were, the last of their species.

Then there’s also an existential loneliness, and the questions we ask ourselves about extraterrestrials, and if we are truly ‘alone' in the universe.

EB And finally, if art can be an antidote to loneliness, could you share an artwork from the past or present, that you find yourself returning to when you need to feel not alone?

MRC Gosh I love this question, but so hard to answer. I think I have been very lucky to have worked at institutions where I have helped to build the permanent collection. So seeing any work I was involved in acquiring always fills me with a great sense of pride, and a connection to my community.

That said, there is one work that comes to mind as like visiting an old friend.

Destiny Deacon, who I was lucky enough to know and work with for several years, made a work called I don’t wanna be a bludger, in 1999. In the 40+ minute video, Destiny plays a character called Delores, who is a sort of exaggerated version of herself, where she embraces all the negative stereotypes that have been weaponised against her for being blak.

Like with everything Destiny did, there is a laugh and a tear in the video, as she walked this thin line between comedy and tragedy. Whenever I see this work, I am just filled with love and my spirit feels light. It is like visiting an old friend.

“Loneliness is also not only a human phenomenon. Our pets get lonely, there are plants in the natural world that seek out connection through mycelium networks.”

UP NEXT

(01)

Lynda Draper Glimmer

Campbelltown Art Centre 06 Dec 25 22 Feb 26

(02)

Tender/brutal

Group curation

Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore 15 Jan 21 Feb 26

(03)

Dawn Ng

The Earth Laughs in Flowers

Singapore Repertory Theatre, Singapore 22 Jan 31 Jan 26

(04)

Art SG

Marina Bay Sands and Convention Centre, Singapore 23 Jan 25 Jan 26

(05)

Alair Pambegan

Sullivan+Strumpf Gadigal/Sydney 29 Jan 21 Feb 26

(06) Wayilkpa / BUKU

Sullivan+Strumpf Naarm/Melbourne 05 Feb 07 Mar 26

(07)

Melbourne Art Fair

Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre 19 Feb 22 Feb 26

(08)

Sanne Mestrom

Gadigal/Sydney 26 Feb 28 Mar 26

(09)

Jess Cochrane

Gadigal/Sydney 26 Feb 28 Mar 26

Campbelltown Arts Centre| 6 December 2025 – 22 February 2026