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Hadley’s Art Prize 2025 - Honourable Mention
Acquisitive $100,000 Landscape Art Award
Judges: Naomi Hobson, Southern Kaantju/Umpila woman and multidisciplinary artist; Caine Chennatt, Director of Curatorial and Cultural Collections at the University of Tasmania; Catherine Woo, Leading Tasmanian-based artist.
Judges Comment:
"Maher has created a window into another world with the subtlest of techniques. In a work that evokes an intimate sublime, a piece of lace appears to hover in space, the air electrically blue. Perhaps it is the method used – where the image is rendered over weeks by exposure to the sun – that imparts it with a kind of vibration, seeming to oscillate between the present and past. The artist possesses a unique set of skills which conjure a kind of metaphysical space that is powerfully felt in the body."
Artist statement:
Lost Field brings imaginative attention to the expanded and elusive boundaries of both place and cosmos. It evolved as light-sensitive ink permeated through paper, which later lay in the sun; an heirloom lacework made by my distant ancestor rested atop. Over many weeks, sunlight faded the paper and a barely visible solar x-ray of the fabric formed. This entry is an inverted photograph of the original artwork. In the inversion process an intensely rich portal of blue light revealed an otherworldly dimension, co-existing with the familiar material realm of our lived reality.
Acquisitive $100,000 Landscape Art Award
Judges: Naomi Hobson, Southern Kaantju/Umpila woman and multidisciplinary artist; Caine Chennatt, Director of Curatorial and Cultural Collections at the University of Tasmania; Catherine Woo, Leading Tasmanian-based artist.
Judges Comment:
"Maher has created a window into another world with the subtlest of techniques. In a work that evokes an intimate sublime, a piece of lace appears to hover in space, the air electrically blue. Perhaps it is the method used – where the image is rendered over weeks by exposure to the sun – that imparts it with a kind of vibration, seeming to oscillate between the present and past. The artist possesses a unique set of skills which conjure a kind of metaphysical space that is powerfully felt in the body."
Artist statement:
Lost Field brings imaginative attention to the expanded and elusive boundaries of both place and cosmos. It evolved as light-sensitive ink permeated through paper, which later lay in the sun; an heirloom lacework made by my distant ancestor rested atop. Over many weeks, sunlight faded the paper and a barely visible solar x-ray of the fabric formed. This entry is an inverted photograph of the original artwork. In the inversion process an intensely rich portal of blue light revealed an otherworldly dimension, co-existing with the familiar material realm of our lived reality.
Lost Field, 2025, Archival pigment print on cotton rag. (Digital inversion of a vanished state: Fugitive-dye solar print on paper, recorded by the light of nipaluna/Hobart). Credits: Photography by Peter Whyte; Print by Simon Olding.
Gravity Portal
Sara Maher
Curated by Kylie Johnson
1 February–8 March 2025
Contemporary Art Tasmania
Sound Design: Nigel Farley
Support structure design and fabrication: Stuart Houghton
Lighting Design: Jason James
Through large works on paper, found object, sculptural experiments in framing, time-based lighting and ambient soundscape, Gravity Portal aimed to open perception to a zone of subtlety, where the tangible and the intangible world seemingly waver, as though out of alignment with gravity’s force. This ethereal and quietly disarming experience invited visitors to feel and appreciate the living agency that underscores our material reality.
This installation was created in dialogue with my close environment of nipaluna/Hobart.
LINKS:
Sound: Nigel Farley, Anti-gravitational event, 2024. Duration 11.48 mins, looped
https://soundcloud.com/nigel-farley/anti-gravitational-event
Digital Exhibition Catalogue (commissioned essays: Eliza Burke and Helen Hyatt-Johnston, Sound link: Anti-gravitational event by Nigel Farley, photos: Peter Whyte and Rémi Chauvin, design: Cath Robinson):
https://contemporaryarttasmania.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/SM_catalogue_final.pdf
Artist Profile: full-feature article: Sara Maher and the expression of light (essay: Lucy Hawthorn, photo’s: Peter Whyte and Rémi Chauvin):
https://artistprofile.com.au/sara-maher-and-the-expression-of-light/
Contemporary Art Tasmania Journal #41: The Between (by Linda Spowart):
https://contemporaryarttasmania.org/journal-41-the-between-by-linda-spowart/
Background :
Gravity Portal began with the discovery of a photo negative of the 1930s era, revealing two sisters who I imagine were the late sisters of the house I live in. This house is on Muwinina land (lutruwita/Tasmania). I have lived here for some years. The photo negative turned up on the floor in my studio room (2023). Maybe it slipped out from behind the old fireplace mantle? The moment of encountering the negative was strangely immersive. I sensed a mysterious agency of another dimension pressing against my experience.
Photo Negative, date unknown (found 2023, nipaluna/Hobart, Tas), 6 x 10cm, photographer unknown
What followed was an instinct to be in touch with this elusive force of atmosphere through a slow, close, daily engagement with my lived environment. The temporary existence of natural phenomena was a sensory trigger for this dialogue to unfold: The old-fashioned roses that grow in my garden are a lingering presence of the late sisters’ lives. As the roses honed my senses to their subtle variations of colour and aroma, I experienced a melancholic intimacy with the sisters’ world. The sky that swirled with patterns and energies became somewhere for me to contemplate this nonlinear dimension of time and being.
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In the studio, I explored the way water and ink coalesced on and through large sheets of paper to reveal ambient fields of peripheral space. A faint glow spills from these fields, redolent of the translucency of a rose petal, or an allusive skyscape. These atmospheric spaces are the clarities and the condensations that resound in my being and move through my lived terrain. They have an air of transcendent beauty, but they are also about unsettlement.
Gravity Well, 2024, light sensitive Japanese ink and indelible Indian ink on paper, sun faded, 107 x 152cm, photo by Peter Whyte
The sky is my gravity, 2024, light sensitive Japanese ink and indelible Indian ink on paper, sun faded, 105 x 150cm, photo by Peter Whyte
The studio making process evolved as a dialogue with materiality and the forces of gravity. Herein, the paper’s surface came to convey a tilting perspective, giving rise to illusionary depth and motion…a peculiar sense of being out of alignment with gravity’s force.
Studio process. photo by Rémi Chauvin
The works incorporate organic inks that are alive with agency. That being so, they are never static in their composition, but respond to the imperceptible energies of air and light, colour-changing and paling over time. Some surfaces became grounds through which to capture delicate sunprints of inherited lacework made by my matrilineal forebears. Through their craft I found empathy with the sisters...A kind of parallel universe. The sunprints are like vestigial expressions of the ancestral mind, lingering somewhere between abstract and figurative form. The precariousness of their fading existence can remind us of our own fleeting mortality, and bring imaginative attention to a liminal realm…one that is not tethered to a temporally linear reading of our day-to-day existence.
The works incorporate organic inks that are alive with agency. That being so, they are never static in their composition, but respond to the imperceptible energies of air and light, colour-changing and paling over time. Some surfaces became grounds through which to capture delicate sunprints of inherited lacework made by my matrilineal forebears. Through their craft I found empathy with the sisters...A kind of parallel universe. The sunprints are like vestigial expressions of the ancestral mind, lingering somewhere between abstract and figurative form. The precariousness of their fading existence can remind us of our own fleeting mortality, and bring imaginative attention to a liminal realm…one that is not tethered to a temporally linear reading of our day-to-day existence.
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Above: Matrilineal traces , 2024, light sensitive Japanese ink on paper, sun prints, 88 x 125cm each. Photos: Peter Whyte
The Gravity Portal installation evolved through a program of engagement with curator Kylie Johnson, sound designer Nigel Farley, designer maker Stuart Houghton and lighting designer Jason James. This close support, dialogue and collaboration opened the way for a subtle and subliminal viewing experience with the works on paper. It enabled the realisation of a vision where sound, light, colour and imagery converged as one immersive atmosphere, invoking the fragility of presence.
install photos: Rémi Chauvin:
Each work was cohered flat to an underlying hidden substrate, and in turn a hidden subframe. The subframes were designed to interlock with either a subtly tilting floor mounted support for horizontal display or a wall mounted French cleat slat for vertical display. These structures were devised to enact an uncanny scenario, through the evocation of lightness and levitation. It was as if the departed sisters (seen in the photo negative) were present in the gallery. Nigel Farley’s electro acoustic soundtrack and Jason James lighting design were intrinsic to the immersive and emotional ‘altered state’ experience of Gravity Portal. These sensitive mediums (light and sound) were synchronised to become one moving frequency, which gave rise to a synaesthetic slippage between audible and visible experience.
Sound: Nigel Farley, Anti-gravitational event, 2024. Duration 11.48 mins, looped: https://soundcloud.com/nigel-farley/anti-gravitational-event
A used fireplace mantlepiece that is reminiscent of the one in my studio was placed in the installation. The object was painted airy grey to match the gallery walls. The idea was to ghost the mantlepiece…make it feel less actual, more like something taking place in the mind...
Sara Maher: Chrysalid, 2023
Bett Gallery (March-April)
Solo Exhibition
Many of the small works were made sitting at a writing desk in my mum’s home, nestled amid trees and vast summer skies of Peramangk Country in the Adelaide Hills. My sister and her girls, who live just nearby, visited daily. As we chattered around mum’s kitchen table, friendly magpies warbled on the veranda. Ornamental Christmas decorations, collected by mum over her lifetime, glimmered all about the house. The sky outside was vibrantly blue and as day ended it became vibrantly pink. The magpies continued to warble on and off through the dark of night. This Christmas, as mum is unwell and we are so aware of life’s preciousness, there was more than ever a feeling of enchantment in the air…as if the veil between this world and the imaginal world was ultra-thin.
The large works were made through the solace of night, here on Muwinina land (Hobart). In my studio, I reflect on the vibrancy of matter -- the way water, earth, ink and fluid medium coalesce on and through large sheets of paper to suggest a presence more ancient than my life -- a nuanced materiality that is infused with memory. Sometimes, raw pastel-drawn markings and symbolic expressions come to hover through these spaces.
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above left: The Sky Within You, 2022, ink on paper, 107 x 152 cm - Photo by Jack Bett
above right: Symbolic Thought Form, 2022, absorbent ground, primer and chalk pastel on paper, 107 x 152 cm - Photo by Peter Angus Robinson
detail: Symbolic Thought Form - Photo by Peter Angus Robinson
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above left: Remnants of a Rainbow, 2023 ,ink on paper, 107 x 152 cm - Photo by Jack Bett
above right: Seeking to Locate an Ancestral Origin, 2022 ink and chalk pastel on paper, 107 x 152 cm - Photo by Peter Angus Robinson
Light Sleeper, 2022-23, ink and watercolour on paper, 21.4 x 45.6 cm (paper size) - Photo by Peter Whyte
Detail: Light Sleeper - Photo by Peter Whyte
The Blue Stocking Bird, 2023, ink and watercolour on paper, 27.2 x 55.3 cm - Photo by Peter Whyte
Detail: The Blue Stocking Bird - Photo by Peter Whyte
Detail: The Blue Stocking Bird - Photo by Peter Whyte
Surfacing through White Noise, 2022-23, ink and watercolour on paper, 20.3 x 50.4 cm - Photo by Peter Whyte
Surfacing through White Noise (detail) - Photo by Peter Whyte
The Rain Maker, 2022, watercolour on paper (detail), 49.5 x 19.9 cm (full image size), 24.5 x 24.5 cm (detail size) - Photo by Peter Whyte
Thought Picture, 2022, watercolour on paper, 21 x 29.7 cm - Photo by Peter Whyte
Ground Control to Grandma Smith, 2023, ink and watercolour on paper, 20.5 x 12.6 cm - Photo by Peter Whyte
tidal.22 - winner
City of Devonport Tasmanian Art Award
Acquisitive $20.000 Prize
Judges: Raymond Arnold, Artist, Ashley Bird, Senior Curator Visual Art and Design, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery and Michelle Boyde, Artistic Director, Design Tasmania.
Media Release
Speaking on behalf of the judges’ Ashley Bird said: “What makes Sara Maher’s work a worthy winner of tidal.22 is its power. The work draws you into an emotional and liminal space – a location of the mind as well as the surface of something calm and wild in equal measure. The work is also relevant and sensitive to current Tasmanian experience, speaking to non-indigenous people’s re-calibration of personal relationship to this place. The artist is successful in viscerally capturing a sense of the ever-changing, tidal sea – responding strongly to the set theme.”
Artist statement:
The page is a threshold through which the eye/mind suspends, unanchored, within the field of an indeterminate vision. The experience of 'being' conveyed is tenuous and shifting, never fully revealing, shadowed, journeying...
My work is analogous to my treading lightly as a settler of Irish-European descent, within spiritual and storied Aboriginal lands. It is also analogous to my re-imagining – with this ground I live on – connection to inherited memory of an ancient mythic world within. Through these thresholds of engagement, everything I encounter has agency and intelligence...A driftwood form might tell me a story; an ancestral being might watch intently through cormorant eyes; a silvery seal emerging through soupy-calm water might be an omen. Herein, tranquil coastal ambience is at once an uneasy current rip/pling through the psyche. Place is so potent and pervasive that the art I make on residency (and for long after) cannot be separated from it. (Sara Maher; Lunawanna-alonnah/Bruny Island residency)
City of Devonport Tasmanian Art Award
Acquisitive $20.000 Prize
Judges: Raymond Arnold, Artist, Ashley Bird, Senior Curator Visual Art and Design, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery and Michelle Boyde, Artistic Director, Design Tasmania.
Media Release
Speaking on behalf of the judges’ Ashley Bird said: “What makes Sara Maher’s work a worthy winner of tidal.22 is its power. The work draws you into an emotional and liminal space – a location of the mind as well as the surface of something calm and wild in equal measure. The work is also relevant and sensitive to current Tasmanian experience, speaking to non-indigenous people’s re-calibration of personal relationship to this place. The artist is successful in viscerally capturing a sense of the ever-changing, tidal sea – responding strongly to the set theme.”
Artist statement:
The page is a threshold through which the eye/mind suspends, unanchored, within the field of an indeterminate vision. The experience of 'being' conveyed is tenuous and shifting, never fully revealing, shadowed, journeying...
My work is analogous to my treading lightly as a settler of Irish-European descent, within spiritual and storied Aboriginal lands. It is also analogous to my re-imagining – with this ground I live on – connection to inherited memory of an ancient mythic world within. Through these thresholds of engagement, everything I encounter has agency and intelligence...A driftwood form might tell me a story; an ancestral being might watch intently through cormorant eyes; a silvery seal emerging through soupy-calm water might be an omen. Herein, tranquil coastal ambience is at once an uneasy current rip/pling through the psyche. Place is so potent and pervasive that the art I make on residency (and for long after) cannot be separated from it. (Sara Maher; Lunawanna-alonnah/Bruny Island residency)
Open Listening (Lunawannah Alonnah/Bruny Island), 2021, Ink on paper, paper size 111 x 107cm - Photo: Jack Bett
Water[shed], 2022
Bett Gallery
Group Exhibition
Water[shed] coincides with the 50th anniversary of the last summer in 1972 when dams on the Huon and Serpentine Rivers were closed and the impounded waters began to rise. Lake Pedder along with over 242 square kilometres of wild landscape in the heart of lutruwita (Tasmania) was swallowed up. The original lake is not forgotten.
Water[shed] brings together 50 Australian and international artists exploring the ideas of ecosystem restoration, re-wilding, grief, loss and celebration of the original Lake Pedder.
Memory of a Lake
Is it possible in moments of environmental crisis that we can all tap into collective images and patterns of thought that dwell in the depths of our being, in the inherited mind-pool of our ancestors? Does this mind-pool connect us to more-than-human spheres of existence, to provoke an emergence of care and respect for one’s total ecology?
Do we all have a memory of the lake?
Memory of a Lake, 2022, acrylic and watercolour on birch painting panel, 30 x 20 x 5cm - Photo: Jack Bett
Un/Touched Wilderness, 2021
Devonport Regional Gallery
curation: Erin Wilson
Artists: Lorraine Biggs, Irene Briant, Selena de Carvalho, Samantha Dennis, Anastasia Gardyne, Sara Maher, Aviva Reed, Mary Scott
Un/Touched Wilderness contrasts the grand narrative of the untamed natural wilderness of Tasmania, often coveted through the tradition of landscape painting, with contemporary artists exploring this landscape on a micro level; collecting, containing, classifying and creating from the diverse ecosystems that form these sweeping vistas. These works make our ecosystems more visible and tangible, while highlighting both the beauty and fragility of our natural surrounds.
A Fragile Connection and The feeling of She-oak
The clay in these works is from an exposed clearing on Lunawanna-alonnah/Bruny Island. On either side of the clearing is a vast tract of she-oak forest. Behind the clearing, a glass fronted guest house is positioned to take in a sublime view of the D'Entrecasteaux Channel, a ‘tranquil coastal wilderness’ as far as the eye can see.
Outside of the colonial gaze, beyond this ‘peaceful’ scene, is a trauma-scape. Here is where Nuenonne people were removed from their homeland. Nuenonne Country, vibrant with countless generations of ancestors is deeply wounded by European colonisation. The quiet resonance of the land, water and air is at once an atmospheric pressure, an uneasy silence.
I feel sorrow within the land and am drawn to the ground to listen…to think-together with the sticky fine-grained earth, revealing communicative worlds within worlds, in the fluid space between materiality and psyche.
Devonport Regional Gallery
curation: Erin Wilson
Artists: Lorraine Biggs, Irene Briant, Selena de Carvalho, Samantha Dennis, Anastasia Gardyne, Sara Maher, Aviva Reed, Mary Scott
Un/Touched Wilderness contrasts the grand narrative of the untamed natural wilderness of Tasmania, often coveted through the tradition of landscape painting, with contemporary artists exploring this landscape on a micro level; collecting, containing, classifying and creating from the diverse ecosystems that form these sweeping vistas. These works make our ecosystems more visible and tangible, while highlighting both the beauty and fragility of our natural surrounds.
A Fragile Connection and The feeling of She-oak
The clay in these works is from an exposed clearing on Lunawanna-alonnah/Bruny Island. On either side of the clearing is a vast tract of she-oak forest. Behind the clearing, a glass fronted guest house is positioned to take in a sublime view of the D'Entrecasteaux Channel, a ‘tranquil coastal wilderness’ as far as the eye can see.
Outside of the colonial gaze, beyond this ‘peaceful’ scene, is a trauma-scape. Here is where Nuenonne people were removed from their homeland. Nuenonne Country, vibrant with countless generations of ancestors is deeply wounded by European colonisation. The quiet resonance of the land, water and air is at once an atmospheric pressure, an uneasy silence.
I feel sorrow within the land and am drawn to the ground to listen…to think-together with the sticky fine-grained earth, revealing communicative worlds within worlds, in the fluid space between materiality and psyche.
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left: A Fragile Connection, 2021, ink, clay sediment from Lunawanna-alonnah and liquid medium on paper (framed), paper size 147 x 106 cm
right: The feeling of She-oak, details as above - Photos by Lou Conboy
Sara Maher: In (and out of) the Grey, 2021
Bruny20 Fellowship Exhibition,
Lunawanna-alonnah/Bruny Island residency
Bett Gallery, July-August
Catalogue Essay by Eliza Burke
Selected essay excerpts:
“…In the European tongue, the Latin word for reside, ‘residere’ meaning “to sit, settle down”, shares its root with ‘residuum’, "a remainder, that which is left behind"ii. For Maher, the Bruny20 residency straddled these fields of meaning as she embarked on an uneasy negotiation of the shifting territories of absence and presence, tracing histories and residues in the land…
…In the gaps between past and present, Maher explores sites where resonance becomes disturbance, where identities form and dissolve under the influence of ghosts, and where stories appear not as narrative but as etched lines, pools of light and rippling surfaces. Acknowledging the unsettled nature of any encounter with place, Maher invites us to observe the flux that defines these spaces, to hold it in consciousness and sense with her, the acute pressure in that moment of holding….
…Using watercolour, ink, pastel, paper, clay sediments, seeds, lost and found texts and photographs, she incorporates impermanence into her practice, suspending and releasing images as incomplete entities, watching them dissolve and evolve through material processes of saturating, hanging, turning, drying, resting. The murmurings of soft pastel outlines and stencilled hollows, fragmented dreamscapes, figures, houses and fields are all part of Maher’s process of ‘presencing’, of listening to the materiality of Country and forging ways to connect to and understand its meanings…."
Sara Maher ‘Working with consciousness’, Catalogue Essay by Eliza Burke
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left: Stick Person, 2021, gesso, absorbent primer and watercolour on cradled panel board, 30 x 20 x 5 cm - Photos: Peter Angus Robinson
right: Recurring Dream Fragments (detail), 2021, gesso, absorbant ground, watercolour and collage fragment on clay board, detail dimensions 17 x 13 cm
Unsettled Ancestor, 2020, glass bottle, suspended collage fragment, human hair and de-seeded Dandelion, 22 x 9.5 x 9.5 cm - Photo by Peter Whyte
Recurring Dream Fragments, 2021, (install shot) Gesso, absorbent primer, watercolour and collage fragments on clay board (framed), triptych dimensions 13 x 56 cm
Recurring Dream Fragments (detail), detail dimensions 17 x 13 cm - Photo: Peter Angus Robinson
Circling back, again and again - the act of returning, 2021, Ink and pastel on paper, 144 x 106 cm (artwork) - Photo by Peter Whyte
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Circling back, again and again - the act of returning (left), and Open Listening (right), 2021, Ink and pastel on paper, 111 x 107 cm (right) and 144 x 106 cm (left) - Photos by Lou Conboy
Open Listening (detail) - photo: Peter Angus Robinson
Buried in the Body, 2020, ink, earth pigment and stick-drawn pastel markings on paper, 147 x 116 cm - Photo: Peter Angus Robinson
Greedy Frog, 2021, Watercolour, collected bird bones (from Lunawanna-alonnah/Bruny Island) and collaged fragments on paper, 18 x 13 cm - Photo: Peter Angus Robinson
Studio process: Intimate and Immense, 2021, ink, pastel and shoreline ephemera on paper, 106 x 148 cm - Photo by Peter Angus Robinson
Breathing space, 2021, ink on paper, 148 x 106 cm, Lunawannah-alonnah/Bruny Island – photo by Peter Angus Robinson
Breathing space (detail) - Photo: by Peter Angus Robinson
Sara Maher (image) & Nigel Farley (sound) : Where time folds endlessly
Biennale Of Australian Art (BOAA), Sept-Nov, 2018
George Farmer & Co Bacon Factory, Ballarat, VIC
Site-responsive installation : sculptural objects, light, sound by Nigel Farley
Supported by BOAA and Arts Tasmania
Visual and sound art converge within the alcove of three curing rooms in the former 19th century George Farmer and Co. Bacon Factory. In this slowly decaying and forgotten space, it is as if some alteration has occurred, creating passage into a sensory 'terrain vague’, an ambiguous zone where past, present and future enfold. Fragile objects and painted thresholds suspend in a layered soundfield, lending a feeling that one is glimpsing into a creative process - where the decaying world of outer reality becomes interwoven with the immaterial realm of inner consciousness.
Video link (Where time folds endlessly 2018)
Where time folds endlessly, 2018 - Photos : Vikk Shayan 1-17, Peter Whyte 18--22
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Sara Maher (image) and Nigel Farley (sound): Slowly fading in, slowly fading out
Evolving from solo residencies (Sara, 2016, Nigel 2018) amid the grey-winter Highland terrain of warloundigerler (Cradle Mountain), lutruwita (Tasmania), this collaborative piece explores the intersection of our memories, reflecting on the subliminal threshold where visual and aural perception interweave.
It depicts the moving texture of water saturated air, morphing with ancient geologies across two frames, suspended in a crystalline soundfield of icy rain and white-noise. Here, the inner self meets the intangible otherness of expanded environment, where the sensory immediacy of landscape immersion and the weight of unsettled memory and emotion in place coincide. Sound by Nigel Farley.
Slowly fading in, slowly fading out, 2018 ; ink, pigment on paper, 154 x 254cm, photo : Jack Bett
Sara Maher : The Breath of Matter Itself
2018 Hutchins Australian Contemporary Art Prize
Brooke Street Pier, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Highly Commended : Artery Tasmanian Artist’s Prize
Judges : Pat Brassington, Edward Colless and Dr Peter Hill
In lutruwita (Tasmania), I seek a language to describe the variance I feel between resonances that evoke an expansion of "being" in place and atmospheres of unsettled cultural memory where layered human histories intersect, in the land and in the psyche. Each piece is a meditation on materiality and a subtle metaphorical response to place and its energies.
Evolving from a residency in the Central Highland Country of warloundigerler (Cradle Mountain), The Breath of Matter Itself is a phenomenological response that intimates the unseen - metaphysically charged by means of alchemic and gravitational processes, ambiguities of light and shadow, resonances of geological time, history prevailing in the land, and the slowed correspondence of mind with matter.
The breath of matter itself 2016 -17, War loun dig er ler (Cradle Mountain), ink & pigment on paper, 150 x 114 cm, photo : Simon Cuthbert (Please see detail of image below)
Sara Maher : Of the half-light
Bett Gallery, Hobart, Tasmania
25 Nov’ - 12 Dec, 2016
Solo Dombrovskis Parks and Wildlife Residency (Sara)
Including a 2 week collaborative component with Nigel Farley
warloundigerler (Cradle Mountain)
Sculptural assemblage, liquid media on clay board and paper, etched copper, installed sound by Nigel Farley.
“ Each day I walked through mossy forest, out to misty, glaciated mountain and lake terrain. I would collect small figure-like ephemera shaped by the elements - twigs and driftwood fragments, the remains of ancient life forms, imaginary creatures and other story remnants. Land and lake often became shrouded in mist, evoking an amorphous, fluid and quietly fluctuating world of obscured details and muted colours. At times it was difficult to gauge distance and depth. Bodies of land, water and self blurred, submerged in weathered terrain.
My sense of the edges and overlaps of time and space deepened while on residency. The temporally near and far, intimate space and immense outside space, merged. Feelings of embodied connection to the highland country resonated with the weight of memory and emotion in place, as the figure/shadow of my Irish and European ancestry walked across Aboriginal land. My small sculptural assemblages, miniature drawings, watercolours and large abstract painting gave form to this layered experience.
Memories continue to filter through my work, linked to an engagement with phenomena of my Hobart surrounds - clouds amassing over kunanyi (Mount Wellington), a clearing night sky, tiny marsupial bones evoking old life forms, thistledown - floating like snow crystals on the wind - growing prolifically across a South Hobart vale once known as 'Valley of the Shadow of Death'…" (Sara)
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"Sara's two month residency incorporated a two week period of collaborative experimentation, linking our shared encounter of place with an exploration of the subliminal threshold between our visual and aural media. I made hydrophone recordings of snow falling, dripping hollows, run-off streams and creek flow, along with contact mic recordings of weathered infrastructure - shingled rooftops of huts, rusted corrugated iron sheeting, wire fencing... These were later transformed through layering and subtle abstraction to suggest peripheral undercurrents of the Cradle Mountain environment, and to converge with sensory resonance in Sara's visual work.” (Nigel) Sound by Nigel Farley; Artist profile (Arts Tasmania artist profile video : Sara on Residency at Cradle Mountain)
The Breath of Matter Itself (detail), 2016 - 2017 : Ink and pigment on paper. Full image : 150 x 114cm, detail: 90 x 50cm, photo : Simon Cuthbert
A ritual for leaving, 2017 : Ink, pigment, de-seeded thistledown on paper in deep set frame, 162 x 118 x 7cm, photo : Peter Whyte. Below : detail.
Composite image ...left : How to hold silence, 2016 : glass bottle, de-seeded dandelion, 18 x 8 x 8cm ; right : Moon pool, 2016, gouache on scratch board, 15 x 15cm, photo: Jack Bett
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top centre : Detail : Origins (marsupial) 2016 : watercolour, ink, found bone on clay board, full image : 15 x 15 cm, detail : 12 x 8 cm, photo : Jack Bett
second row left : Night figures 2016, watercolour on scratchboard, framed, 15 x 15cm (image size)
second row right : Land memory (Mother) 2016, watercolour, driftwood on clay board, framed, 27 x 27cm (frame size)
third row left : In relation 1 (grove) 2016, waterclour, twig, on clay board, framed, 27 x 27cm (frame size)
third row right : In relation 2 (kernel) 2016, watercolour and kernel on clay board, frame, 18 x 18cm (frame size)
bottom left : Erupting silence 2 2016, watercolour and ink on clay board, framed, 27 x 27 cm (frame size)
bottom right : Erupting silence 1 2016, watercolour and ink on clay board, framed, 20 x 20 cm (clay board size)
photos : Peter Whyte
In the hollows 2 2016, watercolour and driftwood fragment on paper, framed, 21 x 15 cm (paper size), photo : Peter Whyte
Forest lines, 2016 : etched copper, ink, 15 x 20 cm, photo : Jack Bett
Origins (skink) 2016, gouache and watercolour on scratch board, framed; 19.5 x 24.5 cm (frame size) ; photo : Peter Whyte
Sara Maher (image) and Nigel Farley (sound): Where one world gleams into another
Where one world gleams into another, 2014 : Ink and clay (from Queenstown, West Coast Tasmania) on hand-scored and abraded paper, 134 x 172cm. photo : Jack Bett, Sound by Nigel Farley.
Detail, right panel: Where one world gleams into another, 2014
Sara Maher (image) & Nigel Farley (sound) : Where the shadow falls
Queenstown Heritage & Arts Festival, 2014 (now The Unconformity)
A Constance ARI project funded by QHAF and Arts Tasmania
Lake Margaret Heretige Hydro Village, West Coast Tasmania
Site-responsive installation set in the superintendent's home/ruin
10-12th October, 2014
Collected objects, site responsive drawing (hand-scored tree branch shadows on paper), light, installed sound by Nigel Farley
"Sara Maher and Nigel Farley's delicate sound-augmented installation, Where the shadow falls, marks the intervening years with the effect of the damp conditions on the fabric of the old houses - the shadows literally flaking, dissolving, falling - accentuating the unrelenting and yet strangely beautiful process
of decay." - Jane Deeth, Review excerpt, 'Working Water: Making Home', Artlink Magazine, March 2015 . Sound by Nigel Farley ; Review by Jane Deeth
Where the shadow falls, 2014, photos : Sara Maher
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Sara Maher : Echoic memory
Catherine Asquith Gallery
Collingwood, Melbourne
8 - 26th Oct, 2013
Mixed media works on paper, installed sound by Nigel Farley
This exhibition was initiated through a shared residency at the Broken Hill Art Exchange, NSW :
"In contemplating the intangible boundaries of wide open spaces - land and sky, day and night, sound and silence - one meets physiological and psychological boundaries of the self, namely the limits of seeing and hearing, and the point at which consciousness turns to reverie. Through experiencing atmospheric and peripheral phenomena of a semi-desert region - shifting light, micro-textures, dispersed/muted sound - one senses a heightened attention to spatiality and dimensionality. One also comes to interpret the landscape through perceived illusions - afterimage, mirage, colour vibration, sound reverberation, etc. It is at the peripheral limits of the senses that persistent yet mutable memories become imprinted on our psyche." Sound by Nigel Farley.
To Transcend Beyond the Cave, To Levitate Above the Trees, 2013 ; ink, clay on paper, 149 x 88cm, photo : Jack Bett
Receding Light III, 2013 : ink, pigment, pastel, pencil, pen on paper, 18 x 45cm, photo : Matthew Stanton
Receding Light I, 2013 : ink, pigment, pastel, pencil, pen on paper, 18 x 61cm, photo : Matthew Stanton
Sara Maher : Memories of space
146 Arts Tasmania, Hobart,Tasmania
September-October 2011
works on paper, sculptural assemblage, Installed sound by Nigel Farley
- Solo Dombrovskis Parks and Wildlife Residency (Sara)
leeawulena (Lake St Clair), Central Highlands, Tasmania
- One month self-initiated residency (Sara and Nigel)
care of LARQ (Landscape Art Research Queenstown), West Coast, Tasmania
This exhibition explored notions of vastness and confinement in response to two inland Tasmanian locations - Lake St Clair and Queenstown. Responding to the intangible boundaries of shoreline and horizon, darkness and dawn, and sound and silence at Lake St Clair, in contrast with the enclosed spaces of decaying ruins and cavernous mining tunnels at Queenstown - the exhibition reflected on how consciousness, through the senses - is experienced : 'If there exists a borderline between mental and physical terrain, it wavers and trembles: it is soft, with vague shapes and edges both devolving toward and evolving from nothingness; it reveals itself through ambiguity and contradiction.' Catalogue essay by Sean Kelly ; Sound by Nigel Farley.
Vigil, 2010: ink and pigment on paper, 160 x 114cm, photo : Peter Angus Robinson
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Anywhere out of this world, 2011 : found ephemera, ink, pigment on paper, 33 x 33 cm (frame depth 7cm)
Canopy, 2012 : ink, pigment on hand punctured paper, 117 x 83cm, photo : Bernie Carr
Sara Maher (image) & Nigel Farley (sound): Four walls of solitude
Out of Site, July-August 2011
CAT (Contemporary Art Tasmania),
Curated by Claire Needham
Catalogue essay by Claire Needham
Four walls of solitude, 2011, Mixed media on paper; sound, 170 x 115cm approx' each, Photo: Clair Needham
A response to Tasmania's penal past, incarceration and psychological states of isolation. Four panels, side by side, and a fifth positioned high above an adjacent wall, reflect on the desolate confines that imprisoned convicts, their scarred histories, and the hallucinatory effect that such spaces might have induced. Sound and image merge in a synaesthesia-like way evoking, through the walls, portals to fantasised escape. Ideas evolved in the time-worn graffiti-laden cells of the Hobart Penitentiary. "In the same way senses interweave, the auditory and visual impression in the work feed one another and transform, causing our perception to become altered.." (Clair Needham). Sound by Nigel Farley; Review by Scot Cotterell.
First wall, 2011, Mixed media on paper, 170 x 115cm, Photo: Bernie Carr Third wall, 2011, Mixed media on paper, 170 x 115cm, Photo: Bernie Carr
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Sara Maher : Inland
LARQ (Landscape Art Research Queenstown), TAS, May 2011,
Solo Dombrovskis Parks and Wildlife Residency (Sara)
leeawulena (Lake St Clair), Central Highlands TAS
Large works on paper, installed sound by Nigel Farley
"Moments of sensory immediacy that heightened my appreciation and apprehension of place offered a poetic window through which I investigated the abstract language behind my making. A series of soundscapes by Nigel were created post-residency... Sound and image merged subliminally to register a resonant connection to the experience of vastness, and its contradictory other, confinement." Sound by Nigel Farley; LARQ annual program page
Whiteout, 2010 : ink, pigment on paper, 114x 86cm, photo : Jan Dallas
Gap in the Forest, 2010 : ink, pigment on paper, 140 x 114cm, photo : Jan Dallas
Cumulus, 2010 : ink, pigment on paper, 132 x 113cm, photo : Bernie Carr
SHOTGUN 2010
Contemporary Art Tasmania and Detached Cultural Organisation
Contemporary Art Tasmania (CAT)
August-Oct 2010
Shotgun is a Contemporary Art Tasmania artist development program. It is an awarded opportunity that supports selected Tasmanian artist/s through a customised and intensive program of high-level industry access, critical engagement and new work. The project began in 2010 as the outcome of a public and private collaboration between Contemporary Art Tasmania and Detached Cultural Organisation (2010 – 19), and grew to include the Museum of Old and New Art (2017 – 19). Shotgun 2010 was the first edition of the project. Three early-career artists were selected for the program that involved commissioned texts on each artists practice - Scot Cotterell by Craig Judd, Sara Maher Breathing Infinity by Biljana Jancic and Cath Robinson by Seán Kelly.
Bilijana Jancic: 'Sara Maher, Breathing Infinity', Shotgun Catalogue essay
https://www.shotgunonline.net/#/2010/
Shotgun install, CAT: Sara Maher work on paper and Cath Robinson sound sculpture, Photo by Jan Dallas
Sara Maher : Passage
Moonah Arts Centre, TAS, Dec 2008
Works emerging through and following an Arts Tasmania Natural and Cultural Residency
wukaluwikiwayna/Maria Island, East Coast, Tas
Essay by Maria Mac Dermott
Review by Jane Stewart
Jane Stewart, Artlink (issue 29:1): review of Passage
Stewart, Jane, Artlink (issue 29:1): review of Passage, Moonah Arts Centre, Hobart, 2008
Passage
An exhibition of works on paper by Sara Maher
Maria Mac Dermott 2008
The Black Room
In one room within Sara Maher’s studio home, three walls each bear a large black rectangle, intensely dark due to the many layers of indelible ink that have been applied. These are the traces of a process whereby contact between large sheets of paper and wet ink on walls contribute to many of the works within this exhibition. The oppressive opacity of the black studio walls however, are very different to the resulting works. These are filled with subtle colourations and delicate textures that acknowledge the life and decay of walls through cracks, corrosions, stains and permutations. These are the points of entry whereby Maher moves through and beyond walls to explore a poetics of transition.
Histories and Holes
Paper plays a crucial role in these investigations. It is through this medium that, based on the principles of printmaking, Maher is able to extract copies of marks embedded in walls. In this way she obtains facsimiles of traces of history, evidences of passages of time, that in some of the works extend back to penal settlement in Tasmania. The thinness and malleability of the paper also allows the artist to impose upon and disrupt something of the continuity of these histories through methods such as layering, For instance, in one work the artist has taken a print of an interior wall within her home and overlaid this with a rubbing from an external wall of an old church in Hobart. In this way she unites histories of different places and times onto a single plane.
In other works, sanding and perforations, cause shifts that are felt to be dramatic if they are read alongside the evolutionary marks found in the rubbings. For example the paper allows Maher to easily puncture and fragment her walls thereby creating ventilations and apertures that offer relief to imprisoning connotations associated with walled enclosures. Walls are the foundation of the works, but breaking them down and traversing them is the animating force.
Nocturne
When Maher was an artist in resident on Maria Island in 2006, she would open the windows of her wooden shack at night, and listen to the ocean and the wind and contemplate the sky and the effects of light on the water while she worked through the nocturnal hours. Maher continues to acknowledge these experiences in her practice, and speaks of feeling uninterrupted and having a heightened sense of the tactility of things during this time.
The difference between these experiences and the more usual ones working in Hobart is interesting to consider. On Maria Island the thin walls of Maher’s shack, and ruinous walls situated on the island, cause contemplation of the idea that the delineation between inside and outside, that walls often define, can break down or become blurred. At these times traversal is more accessible, more possible. In Hobart, the walls of our houses function to keep the outside world at bay so that the interiors of our homes offer refuge and retreat. However, the theme of traversal remains omnipresent in this body of work by Maher. The journeys she describes are undertaken at night for in darkness walls waver and dissolve into fields and oceans, interstellar skies and other luminous presences.
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Studio process. Breathing Hole, 2008, ink and pigment on paper,114 x 180 cm
An impression of my studio wall, with a hole perforating through the page at mouth level. A threshold of tension between inner self and outer vibrational continuity.
An impression of my studio wall, with a hole perforating through the page at mouth level. A threshold of tension between inner self and outer vibrational continuity.
Detail: Breathing Hole, ink and pigment on paper
Breathing Holes, 2008, ink on paper with sanded abrasions (convict prison cell wall rubbing), 114 x 135 cm
photo by Peter Angus Robinson
Breathing Holes was made inside a convict-built solitary confinement cell at Pydairrerme/Koonya, Tasman Peninsula. The white areas where the paper was abraded retain an impression of the cell wall. In reality the holes are ventilation or breathing holes - no light enters through them. Working in the dark of the cell I could just make out the white of the paper, like a faint constellation of stars.
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At night I work by candlelight in an old whalers shack. Wind and ocean sound vibrate through the shack walls, through the flickering shadows, through me...Night time engages an intuitive disposition that opens to a heightened sense of material tactility. Working with historic relics of the islands colonial era energises and haunts my consciousness. (Sara Maher, wukaluwikiwayna/ Maria Island, 2006) Ladder to Unknown was inspired by a 19th-century childs bedhead relic found on Maria Island. |
Ladder to Unknown, 2006, ink, chalk pastel and oil paint on paper, 114 x 135 cm
Limbus, 2006, charcoal on paper, 114 x 180 cm
Limbus was made against an exterior wall of Hunts cottage. Ruby Hunt lived on Maria Island from 1925 to 1968. From her home on the hill she operated Maria Islands pedal wireless, which was the only communication between the island and Tasmania.