All That Returns

All That Returns was a group exhibition of five Naarm (Melbourne)-based artists: Joanna Buckley, Laura Dubsky, Rebecca Jones, Elif Sezen and myself. The exhibition brought together practices connected by an interest in abstraction, materiality and the poetic qualities of everyday things.

Together, our works created a conversation around material, memory and emotion, exploring ideas of repetition, transformation and return. I was particularly interested in the idea that things, relationships and experiences can return to us in different forms, rather than moving in a straight line.

For this exhibition, I continued my exploration of care and domestic labour through ceramics and the familiar kitchen towel. I was interested in the repetitive and often unnoticed nature of care, and how everyday acts of cleaning, tending and maintaining can become embedded within our relationships and passed between generations.

I worked with porcelain and steel, materials that have very different qualities but share a sense of strength and durability. I was interested in bringing these materials together with softer, more familiar domestic forms. The irregular and somewhat messy surfaces of the works resisted a polished or minimalist aesthetic, creating a tension between strength and vulnerability.

For me, these qualities reflected the nature of care itself. Care is rarely neat or perfect; it is ongoing, repetitive and often unseen. Yet these small acts can be deeply meaningful and are essential to how we sustain ourselves, each other and the relationships around us.