Spanning sculpture, painting and expanded photography, Soft Cycle reflects the textures of daily life and its biology. The exhibition evokes the cycle as both structure and effect, as a frame of inhabited time and a way of making, in individually referenced rhythms.
Using multi-disciplinary methods, Kate Woods creates alternate worlds, by staging botanical structures against pre-existing paintings by environmentally engaged artists. Grounded in twentieth-century art histories involving land and documenting the ephemeral, her recent works emerge from walking at the margins of an urban bushwalk near her home. In these overgrown, self-seeded sites of indeterminate ownership, Woods investigates the complex ecologies of the introduced plants that grow there, and their entanglements with humans as non-human subjects.
Ruth Thomas-Edmond's repetitions hum with domestic efficiency. Presenting as gentle units of labour; her agreeable arrangements conjure gauzy daylight, neat separations of coloured washes and sponged daubs on white sheets. Occupying discrete pockets of ‘slow time’ in sustained observations, each painting marks a moment within an unfolding trajectory and a position within the broader still life genre where conventions are refreshed with wry reverie and deftly deployed in occasionally awkward ellipses and off-piste shadows.
Unapologetically large and physical in their conception Noa Noa von Bassewitz’s maternal forms spill and breathe into the gallery space, with gentle flow and presence. Her large-scale sculptures are a reclamation of the primordial pattern of womanhood in its phased stages of becoming. Her embodied excavations employ (in her own words), a “feminist methodology crystallised into an ethic of softness” — in cycles of care made gently yet insistently as sites of political resistance.