14 February - 9 MARCH
FRONT GALLERY

Briony Galligan
Conjuring i already forgot

‘Conjuring i already forgot’ is an exhibition of part objects and images: part heirloom - part palliative - part family tree – part tree clinging for life on a public promenade. 

The exhibition features a giant hand-dyed curtain enfolding the space with portals for seeing through to another side. The textile work has been made with my son/sun’s grandmother, my lover and some friends. A series of tools carved from London plane tree - toxic invasive trees destined for removal - await a time beyond productivity for use. Photocopied images of felled and fallen plane trees line the walls. 

What if we think the way invasive trees grow and are used together with how genealogies unfold? What happens after the trees die? Are their souls buried in the ground next to their bodies? How do we tend to them? Are repair and healing only ever partial possibilities?

Artist Biography

Briony Galligan lives and works on Wurundjeri Country, Naarm/Melbourne. Galligan aims to make environments—including through drawing, installation, sculpture and performance—that are camp, slippery and suspended, more atmosphere than coherent logic. She positions sculptural objects as conduits, imagining them as tools and appendages to move through disequilibrium. Recent work addresses histories of childhood and play, the construction of authority and order, urban planning, gestating, dying and palliative care. Galligan has also worked responding to various queer representations, archives and scrapbooks and is curious about the immateriality and invisibility of queer desire, both independently and with artist and writer Mel Deerson. She has shown work at KINGS ARI, Westspace, First Draft, TCB, NGV, Heide MOMA, Gertrude, Cemeti Art House and Sangkring Art Space. Teaching and artist organising is also important to Galligan, working as a sessional academic at Victorian College of the Arts, running seminars and workshops with Art Programme and Platform Arts Geelong.