28 may - 21 june 2025
front gallery
Lauren Downton
Mutable Realities
Statement
Mutable Realities employs grafting as a method to explore themes of hybridity, entanglement, ecology and material culture. Forming an intertwining meshwork, Mutable Realities evokes shifting states of growth, mutation and dissolution. Ceramic casts of organs, branches, antlers, rubbish and found plastics accumulate and intermingle into hybrid states.
Downton combines the ghostly qualities of porcelain with post-consumer materials—such as found rubbish and second-hand artificial flowers—as well as natural materials including whiskers, fleece and glaze, creating slippages between what is biological and artificial, natural and synthetic. Exploring notions of the ‘cast off’ and excess, these hybrid fusions examine the complex entanglements between consumption in contemporary society, and the natural environment.
By interweaving animate and inanimate matter, Downton dismantles material hierarchies and makes way for imagined futures with regenerative thought. Shifting between thresholds of death and life, object and ghost, Mutable Realities explores conditions of permanence, transmutation and renewal across human and non-human worlds.
Downton explores hybridity as a means of re-imagining what it means to be human and redefining how we interrelate with nature—how we perceive its boundaries, and understand its enmeshments with society.
Artist Bio
Lauren Downton is an emerging artist working in contemporary ceramics and installation, based on Kaurna land, South Australia. She combines animal, botanical, and human-made forms into ghostly hybrid assemblages that examine humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
Downton was selected to exhibit in the 2022 Hatched: National Graduate Exhibition at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. She has gained multiple awards from the University of South Australia including The Australian Ceramics Association Award (2023), Harry P Gill Memorial Medal Award for outstanding work in ceramics (2021) and Vacation Research Scholarship (2022). In 2024, she was presented with the Fetzer Award for Excellence and City Rural Insurance Development Award at the Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition.
BACK gallery
Susan Charlton
archive / fever / dreams
Statement
‘In reshaping her creative output, Susan Charlton has become an author of her own archive as creative practice, making visible and material the shifting terrain of this dis/juncture as it is taking place.’
— Dr Liz Bradshaw
archive / fever / dreams emerges from Susan Charlton’s return to Kaurna Yarta/Adelaide in October 2019, after decades away working in film, archives and museums on Gadigal Country in Sydney.
These shifts in time and place have created the conditions for shifts in process and form, as Susan has begun drawing from her writing, curatorial and collecting practices to experiment with found and gifted images and objects.
archive / fever / dreams combines two art-archival series, haunted by the unfolding crises of the 2020s:
* The Hunger: bewitching collage works, splicing together food photography and satellite imagery, to speak of food commodification and degradation; global surveillance and extractivism.
* Thirst Traps: delicately balanced sculptural pieces and illuminations, composed from gifted glass and china from the excess of contemporary living.
Together, in the boutique back room of FELTspace, these confections and constructions conjure up a psychogeography that is equal parts memorial shrine, chemistry lab and museum of consumption.
Artist Bio
Susan Charlton is a writer and curator, artist and archivist, with a decades-long practice in film, archives, museums, libraries and galleries in Sydney. Since returning to Kaurna Yarta/Adelaide in 2019, she has been 2020 ART WORKS Writer-in-Residence, presented by Guildhouse in partnership with City of Adelaide, and has written essays about artists Margaret Dodd, Cynthia Schwertsik, Deidre But-Husaim, Jane Skeer and Sydney based artist-curator Liz Bradshaw. Susan has been Guest & Program Coordinator for three Adelaide Film Festival Expand Labs, leading to the 2022-24 AFF/Samstag $100,000 Expand Moving Image Commissions.
Susan’s Sydney based curatorial projects include the Museum of Love & Protest for the 40th anniversary of Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras; the Unity! Strength! Justice! 100th anniversary exhibition for NSW Teachers Federation; three Feminism & Film programs for Sydney Film Festival 2017, and This Woman is Not a Car: Margaret Dodd exhibition in Sydney and Adelaide.
Susan worked as Creative Producer at NSW State Archives & Records, from 2001-15, creating Vital Signs magazine and curating exhibitions based on the archive’s collection, including co-curating the In Living Memory exhibition and tour of photographs from the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board.
Susan first established her Sydney career as a film distributor, programmer and publicist in the 1980s, and attained her Master of Media Art at College of Fine Arts (UNSW Art, Design & Architecture) in 1995.
FELTdark
M Baker
The Sea Cure
Statement
The Sea Cure is a video performance showcasing the relentless pursuit of wellness from the point of view of a chronically ill person. Exploring themes of isolation, desperation, hope, failure and the ritualistic quality of perseverance.
Using the beach as a stage, the artist took inspiration from actions associated with that of historic medical advice for ailments of many unknown origins. In the 1700’s being sent away to the seaside to harness the healing powers of the salt air and the ocean was thought to be a cure-all.
In Baker’s experience when a treatment does not help it is framed as an individual failure. “You didn’t try it long enough, you didn’t fully commit, you must have done it wrong, just do it again.” These dismissive statements have been echoed across the countless medical professionals Baker has seen. Enforcing the capitalist ideas of a person’s value being only as much as their productive output. These sentiments are only amplified by wider society. Baker feels a sense of social shunning; restricted because of illness symptoms, inaccessibility and stigma associated with being chronically ill, and the shame from the social expectations going unmet.
Why Baker continues their quest for wellness is complex. Is it fueled by hope? To have their existence validated by the expectations capitalism places on us all? Why is it that no matter the cost, existing as they are has been shown to not be enough? Why must you always try to be more?
Artist Bio
M Baker is a disabled interdisciplinary artist. Born in Ireland Baker lived the first 13 years of their life there before moving to Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar (Western Australia).
Bakers practice is primarily informed by their identity. Using their artwork as a tool of reflection, connection and sharing of personal experience. The mediums Baker utilises in creating are limitless and adaptive to their ability at the time of creating. This fluidity allows for a dynamic exploration of self. Having made work in the realm of performance, video, sculpture and beyond.