Belly-Up, attends to the lived experience of loss by meandering, with a needle and thread, across the digitally printed image of a cane toad’s stomach. These wanderings are sometimes guided by the grooves of the toad’s leathery, now-pixelated, skin. Other times, the stitches are aimless, lost to the blur of the iPhone’s algorithmic interpretations. The oversized cane-toad-as-companion enables me to go places. To my mother’s toad-laden garden in southeast Queensland on Gabi Gabi country, late one summer’s afternoon. To the comfort of resting for a few hours on a giant imaginary belly. Slowly stitching across the image of the toad’s softest spot is a way of accommodating feelings of sorrow and yearning in my art practice.
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Belly-Up was shown as part of Something Holding these Bodies In-Kind 30:55, a collective exhibition with artists Chris Fontana, Corinna Berndt, Josephine Mead, Leila Gerges, Lucy Foster, Marcela Alejandra Gómez-Escudero, Nina Sanadze, Sofi Basseghi, Tara Gilbee and Tina Stefanou at Stockroom Gallery, Kyneton in September, 2023. The exhibition was as part of the Collective Polyphony Festival, a ground-breaking multi-space event that fosters and nurtures emerging and established artist collectives.
Exhibition documentation by Astrid Mulder. @astridmulder.photography
Documentation of artwork details by Sarah Rudledge