Angus Brown, Leon Rice-Whetton, Kym Maxwell, Nicholas Burridge, Rachel Rovira & Katie Paine
Matter & Spirit: Notes Toward a Vital Materialism
4
March 2026
4
Mar
2026
15
Aug 2026
Matter & Spirit: Notes Toward a Vital Materialism
Angus Brown, Leon Rice-Whetton, Kym Maxwell, Nicholas Burridge, Rachel Rovira & Katie Paine
4
March 2026
4
March
2026
15
August 2026
This project takes shape across three consecutive exhibitions, conceived as chapters within a single inquiry into matter, extraction, transformation, and site. Each exhibition approaches these questions differently, yet all are grounded in a shared investigation: what if matter is not inert substrate, but active participant? What if landscapes, infrastructures, roots, minerals, pulp, clay, cables, and wreckage exert forces of their own?
The project draws from contemporary vital materialist thought, particularly the work of Jane Bennett, whose conception of vibrant matter proposes that agency is distributed across human and nonhuman assemblages. Matter does not only receive form. It impedes, exceeds, collaborates. This thinking resonates with earlier philosophies of nature in which matter is understood as duration and spontaneous generation rather than static substance.
At the same time, the project remains attentive to political economy. In dialogue with Joshua Simon’s writing on neomaterialism, the exhibitions consider how materials circulate through regimes of extraction, production, and value. Timber becomes pulp. Pulp becomes paper. Clay becomes surface. Infrastructure becomes spectacle. Submarine cables become invisible architecture. Commodities and ruins alike accumulate historical force.
Across the three exhibitions, material transformation is understood as a structuring force, shaping landscapes, infrastructures, and forms through ongoing processes of extraction, decay, circulation, and renewal.
~
Image | Brett Eloff, courtesy University of the Witwatersrand. The Makapansgat cobble, a jasperite pebble excavated in 1925 from the Makapan Valley, South Africa. Its nearest geological source is approximately 32km from where it was found, suggesting it was carried there by an Australopithecus africanus individual between 2 and 3 million years ago, making it one of the oldest known manuports.
A manuport is a natural object whose only transformation is displacement. No extraction, no processing, just a decision by someone to pick something up and move it somewhere else. Because manuports are unmodified, archaeologists have concluded that many must have been chosen for their beauty , making them some of the earliest known recognitions of aesthetic character, and possibly some of the earliest examples of (found) art.
~
Pulp,
Angus Brown
4 March – 18 April
In Pulp, Angus treats the photograph both as an image and as an object shaped by the same material forces it depicts. Capturing the substance and significance of industry across South Western Victoria, Angus has produced physically embodied images of the blue gum plantations across the region, as well as the industrial sites where these trees are processed into pulp. The photographs document vast monocultures, open-air stockpiles and the continuous movement of timber through 24-hour pulping terminals. These landscapes feel engineered and otherworldly, shaped by extraction, repetition and scale.
In the gallery the project follows the life cycle of the blue gum from plantation to pulp, tracing the transformation of tree into paper. This movement is represented in the photographs themselves, and also materially embedded within them. Scrap limbs salvaged from recently flattened plantations have been pulped into sawdust; to be introduced into the exhibition space as a sculptural element, tangible image surface and paper toning method. Strengthening the connection to process and place, these material links help to make the image-based works inseparable from the resource they depict.
What emerges is a kind of circular return. The tree becomes pulp, pulp becomes paper, paper becomes image, and the image carries the residue of its origin. There is something quietly alchemical in this shift of states, where matter changes form yet retains a trace of what it has been. The material does not disappear into representation. It persists within it.
~
Strange Powers,
Kym Maxwell, Nicholas Burridge, Leon Rice-Whetton
29 April – 13 June
Opening Wednesday 29 April, 6–8pm
The second chapter of Matter & Spirit gathers three practices around the network (dendritic, mycorrhizal, logistical) as material condition and active force. Where the opening exhibition traced the life cycle of a single resource, this exhibition moves outward. Into contested river systems, industrial dead zones, and the underground life of soil. All three artists are attentive to what Jane Bennett calls thing-power - the capacity of nonhuman matter to impede, exceed, or redirect human intention. But none of the works exist outside of capital either. A river shaped by five thousand years of mining and the British company that industrialised it; a tree felled to service power lines; a portside landscape restructured around the movement of freight. They are also grounded, then, in the political question Joshua Simon poses: who extracts, who profits, and what gets left behind. The works in this exhibition follow matter as it organises itself; across, beneath, and often in spite of the systems imposed on it.
~
Rachel Rovira, Katie Paine
24 June – 15 August
Opening Thursday 25 June
This project takes shape across three consecutive exhibitions, conceived as chapters within a single inquiry into matter, extraction, transformation, and site. Each exhibition approaches these questions differently, yet all are grounded in a shared investigation: what if matter is not inert substrate, but active participant? What if landscapes, infrastructures, roots, minerals, pulp, clay, cables, and wreckage exert forces of their own?
The project draws from contemporary vital materialist thought, particularly the work of Jane Bennett, whose conception of vibrant matter proposes that agency is distributed across human and nonhuman assemblages. Matter does not only receive form. It impedes, exceeds, collaborates. This thinking resonates with earlier philosophies of nature in which matter is understood as duration and spontaneous generation rather than static substance.
At the same time, the project remains attentive to political economy. In dialogue with Joshua Simon’s writing on neomaterialism, the exhibitions consider how materials circulate through regimes of extraction, production, and value. Timber becomes pulp. Pulp becomes paper. Clay becomes surface. Infrastructure becomes spectacle. Submarine cables become invisible architecture. Commodities and ruins alike accumulate historical force.
Across the three exhibitions, material transformation is understood as a structuring force, shaping landscapes, infrastructures, and forms through ongoing processes of extraction, decay, circulation, and renewal.
~
Image | Brett Eloff, courtesy University of the Witwatersrand. The Makapansgat cobble, a jasperite pebble excavated in 1925 from the Makapan Valley, South Africa. Its nearest geological source is approximately 32km from where it was found, suggesting it was carried there by an Australopithecus africanus individual between 2 and 3 million years ago, making it one of the oldest known manuports.
A manuport is a natural object whose only transformation is displacement. No extraction, no processing, just a decision by someone to pick something up and move it somewhere else. Because manuports are unmodified, archaeologists have concluded that many must have been chosen for their beauty , making them some of the earliest known recognitions of aesthetic character, and possibly some of the earliest examples of (found) art.
~
Pulp,
Angus Brown
4 March – 18 April
In Pulp, Angus treats the photograph both as an image and as an object shaped by the same material forces it depicts. Capturing the substance and significance of industry across South Western Victoria, Angus has produced physically embodied images of the blue gum plantations across the region, as well as the industrial sites where these trees are processed into pulp. The photographs document vast monocultures, open-air stockpiles and the continuous movement of timber through 24-hour pulping terminals. These landscapes feel engineered and otherworldly, shaped by extraction, repetition and scale.
In the gallery the project follows the life cycle of the blue gum from plantation to pulp, tracing the transformation of tree into paper. This movement is represented in the photographs themselves, and also materially embedded within them. Scrap limbs salvaged from recently flattened plantations have been pulped into sawdust; to be introduced into the exhibition space as a sculptural element, tangible image surface and paper toning method. Strengthening the connection to process and place, these material links help to make the image-based works inseparable from the resource they depict.
What emerges is a kind of circular return. The tree becomes pulp, pulp becomes paper, paper becomes image, and the image carries the residue of its origin. There is something quietly alchemical in this shift of states, where matter changes form yet retains a trace of what it has been. The material does not disappear into representation. It persists within it.
~
Strange Powers,
Kym Maxwell, Nicholas Burridge, Leon Rice-Whetton
29 April – 13 June
Opening Wednesday 29 April, 6–8pm
The second chapter of Matter & Spirit gathers three practices around the network (dendritic, mycorrhizal, logistical) as material condition and active force. Where the opening exhibition traced the life cycle of a single resource, this exhibition moves outward. Into contested river systems, industrial dead zones, and the underground life of soil. All three artists are attentive to what Jane Bennett calls thing-power - the capacity of nonhuman matter to impede, exceed, or redirect human intention. But none of the works exist outside of capital either. A river shaped by five thousand years of mining and the British company that industrialised it; a tree felled to service power lines; a portside landscape restructured around the movement of freight. They are also grounded, then, in the political question Joshua Simon poses: who extracts, who profits, and what gets left behind. The works in this exhibition follow matter as it organises itself; across, beneath, and often in spite of the systems imposed on it.
~
Rachel Rovira, Katie Paine
24 June – 15 August
Opening Thursday 25 June
Angus Brown
Angus's practice stretches image-making beyond the flat pictorial plane, bringing sculptural approaches into photography to give images a material presence. His work is driven by a sustained curiosity about materials (their behaviours, processes, and properties) with physical interventions that probe our assumptions about the substances around us, often drawn from industry.
Working across photography and sculpture, Angus seeks to expand what a photographic image can do and where it can sit, pushing the medium into new critical and material territory.
Nicholas Burridge
Nicholas Burridge is a regional Victorian-based artist whose practice has developed through extensive experience in foundries and industrial fabrication. This hands-on background informs his approach to sculpture, where making operates as a method for thinking through geology, ecology, and environmental change.
His work examines how industrial processes both mimic and reshape the natural world, and how materials carry embedded cultural and political histories. Burridge has produced projects involving man-made lava, explosive metal forming, and machines that grind rock and re-solidify that sediment. These works position sculpture as a form of material research, exposing the forces and conditions held within seemingly inert matter.
His practice is research-driven and site-responsive, often developed through fieldwork and engagement with specific ecologies and geologies. He has undertaken residencies at the Living Museum of the West, Canberra Glassworks, The Quarry, Jack’s Magazine, and the Rio Tinto mining basin in southern Spain.
Burridge holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Monash University (2016) and a Master’s in Critical Design from Elisava, Barcelona (2025).
Kym Maxwell
Kym Maxwell is an interdisciplinary artist and author living on unceded Wurundjeri Country in Naarm (Melbourne). Her practice explores the entanglements between education, identity, and social space, evolving across sculptural, performative, curatorial, and pedagogic formats. Since 2012, Kym has developed a body of work that rethinks how institutional frameworks, particularly those connected to learning, shape both art and public life. Since 2025, her practice has become increasingly sculptural, photographic, and hand-drawn, reflecting a shift from earlier publication-based or web-driven modes. Despite these transitions, Kym continues to investigate the hidden languages of power, place, and relational structures within the cultural and educational spheres.
Kym holds a Master of Fine Art (Research) from Monash University, a Master of Education from RMIT, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts. She is a recipient of the Australia Council Career Development Grant and the Ian Potter Cultural Trust Emerging Artist Travelling Scholarship. Kym’s work remains dedicated to the transformation of public consciousness through aesthetic and relational encounters, foregrounding how art can both reflect and reimagine the pedagogies of everyday life.
Leon Rice-Whetton
Leon is an artist and filmmaker based in Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri country. Leon is interested in the poetics and politics of infrastructure, cities and ecology, with a particular focus on the Western suburbs of Naarm/Melbourne. Leon's work has been exhibited and screened in places both near and far. They are a current MFA candidate at Monash University.
Katie Paine
Katie Paine is a Naarm-based artist and writer. Her practice spans installation, video, narrative fiction, drawing, photography and occasionally performance. Her practice concerns itself with the serpentine trajectories of ideas and information across time, and the ways that we encounter and understand the world through the collection of information and the construction of knowledge. She is interested in the fallacies of institutionalised knowledge and the spectral and poetic spaces that open up during instances of miscommunication, failure and misunderstanding. Recent work has explored such ideas across the fields of semiotics, hauntology, archival politics, magical realism and science fiction.
Paine recently completed her MFA at the University of Melbourne in 2022. She has exhibited at First Draft, Spring 1883, Gertrude Contemporary, Kingston Art Centre, Metro Arts, Bundoora Homestead Footscray Community Arts Centre, Burnie Regional Gallery, Composite Moving Image, Lon Gallery, F.S. Meyer Gallery, CAVES, TCB, ACMI, c3 Contemporary Art Space, Kings ARI, La Trobe Art Institute, Blindside, George Paton Gallery, VOID Gallery, Seventh Gallery and Bus Projects. She has upcoming exhibitions at Seventh Gallery and Counihan Gallery and was recently shortlisted for the Darebin Art Prize. She writes for publications such as Performance Review, Vault Magazine, Art + Australia, un-Magazine, Running Dog, Runway Journal and Art Almanac alongside a variety of art galleries.
Rachael Rovira
Rachel Rovira is a Melbourne-based artist working across photography, installation, performance, and writing. Her practice is rooted in fieldwork, visiting sites of extraction, abandonment, and industrial residue across Victoria, and traces the material legacies of mining as they persist in corroded and hollowed-out landscapes. Rachael graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing and Printmaking from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2024, where her graduate work responded to an active quarry in Melbourne's south-east, recontextualising mining detritus and photographic prints through spatial and material investigations. Her work considers photography itself as an extractive act, attending to how images frame and distort as much as they document.