What happens when subjectivity is co-constituted by things we cannot fully see or control?

Now housed within a former maternal and infant health centre, Seventh Gallery is a site already charged with a history of care and surveillance - an architecture that casts long shadows across The Other Room. The exhibition emerges from, and responds to, this ambience. Here, psychic and physical space fold into one another. We find ourselves in rooms within rooms, folded into an interiority haunted by strange intimacies and echoes.

Emerging from shared reading and dialogue with Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie, and Lisa Blackman’s Immaterial Bodies, the exhibition orbits porous zones: between subject and object, gesture and residue, the felt and the unspeakable. Across sculpture, installation, photography, ceramics, painting, and animation, the artists in The Other Room work with and against their materials to render subjectivity as slippery, unstable, and relational. This is a show about the immaterial textures of interior life - the feelings we inherit, the structures we inhabit, and the haunted architectures we build to contain them.

Lily Holmes’ paintings drift through dreamlike zones where interiority and environment dissolve into one another - fluid spaces animated by wind and air, and the strange choreography of memory. Figures drift across watery surfaces or sway like trees in motion, suspended in uncanny tableaux that merge the corporeal and the elemental. These fantastic landscapes, magic mountains and gardens, are portals into parallel worlds. Lily’s paintings invite viewers to consider how grief imprints itself gently and rhythmically, like a weather system that moves through the body and across space. Her work visualises the spectral presence of loss and longing without fixing them in narrative, instead it favours a poetics of suspension, where subjectivity becomes porous, caught in the atmospheric pull between the seen and the felt.

Suspended like an afterimage to Lily’s ethereal landscape, Emma Pinsent’s dangling glass mobile introduces a fragile choreography of material memory and transformation. The sculpture was created by casting sections of rope salvaged from a beach. Informed by a materially driven, site-responsive practice, Emma’s work inhabits a post-industrial register, where discarded matter such as plastic, glass, metal, and rope, refuse to lapse into disuse. Instead, these fragments are refigured as sensate, haunted objects: residues of extractive systems that persist in altered form. Her practice engages with the spectral afterlives of capitalism and colonialism, animating materials not as inert waste, but as dynamic agents of entanglement. Within The Other Room, her work speaks to a shared preoccupation with unstable boundaries, between body and environment, presence and trace. It invites viewers into a speculative ecology of care and decomposition, where the structures that govern life - architectural, industrial, emotional - are revealed as porous, fallible, and always in the process of becoming undone.

Fergus Berney-Gibson’s solo works occupy a quiet but charged space hanging alongside Lily’s largest painting and Emma’s glass mobile, as you enter the gallery. Two stretched goat hides, pierced with silver D-rings, hang like vestments or restraint devices - evoking altars and apparatuses. Suede clashes with chrome, softness with severity, as these sculptural surfaces oscillate between vulnerability and control. Also situated in this space, and spread throughout the adjoining space, Fergus’s collaborative works with Zoë Prineas merge queer fraternal ritual with uncanny domestic estrangement. Velvet, leather, fur, and steel are assembled around dumbbells - symbols of discipline and masculinity - recasting them as objects of deviance, excess, and sensual play. These hybrids are plush, feral, and strange, their mutated forms holding desire and discomfort in equal measure. In conversation with Emmica Lore’s Bunny, and Lauren Cameron’s serpentine vessels located in the final room of the gallery, they animate the exhibition with a kind of haunted opulence: animal, ornamental, and embodied. Across both practices, Fergus and Zoë treat objects as relational surrogates - vessels for feeling, ritual, and resistance. Their works stretch subjectivity across surfaces and systems, holding space for what is doubled, tethered, and undone.

Clare Rae’s Untitled Actions is a long-form photographic and video series that stages her own body in conceptual and spatial dialogue with institutional architecture. In this latest iteration, captured at the University of Melbourne’s offsite art storage facility, she draws on a lineage of feminist artists and theorists who reclaim the body as a site of knowledge, resistance, and ‘misbehaviour’. Through physical play and gestural subversion, Clare unsettles the supposed neutrality of bureaucratic and archival space: a scissor lift becomes a post-partum hospital bed; a truck blanket, a swaddled infant. These actions are quiet, absurd, and charged - inflected by the entangled labours of artist, mother, and researcher. Her body, both subject and tool, maps out an alternate logic of occupation: awkward, intimate, insistent.

Where Clare Rae’s photographic gestures map a body entangled within institutional space, Nat Penney’s sculpture renders that entanglement as object: a large, metal rocking chair whose bed-like surface is embedded with little metal domes. Drawing on her background in furniture making and fabrication, Nat constructs forms that mimic therapeutic design yet disturb its promise. The domes, suggestive of massage mechanisms, also recall the aesthetics of hostile architecture - inviting contact while denying comfort. The rocking motion conjures a choreography of nervous repetition, a coping mechanism made material. In this, Nat’s work aligns with Mark Fisher’s eerie: an object too animate, too charged, to be inert. Within The Other Room, this sculpture becomes a haunted prosthesis, holding the weight of emotional histories in its quiet, repetitive sway.

In the final room of the gallery, Linda Judge’s suspended sculpture, composed of 590 recycled paper bread tags, materialises a delicate tension between ephemerality and fortitude. Collected through her participation in the community-driven initiative Breadtags for Wheelchairs, the tags bear traces of care economies, domestic routine, and waste cycles - each stamped with a “best before” date, now expired. In this meshwork of fragments, time becomes sedimented in the most modest of materials. Drawing on Middle Eastern geometric motifs that foreground principles of unity and order, Linda’s interlocking polygons form a fragile lattice. Her use of materials echoes Julia Kristeva’s abject, where the discarded becomes a site of meaning. As with other works in The Other Room, Linda’s sculpture stages a quiet encounter with the immaterial textures of the everyday. It gestures toward a future-oriented ethics of care, where the remnants of domestic life are reassembled into speculative architectures of renewal.

Emmica Lore’s Bunny is hard to miss - monumental, glimmering, and impossible to ignore. Rendered from a humble jelly mould, meticulously encrusted in thousands of shiny peach sequins, the work amplifies a domestic object into an icon of excessive femininity. In its scale and shine, Bunny is an exuberant gesture that destabilises hierarchies of taste, seriousness, and value. Drawing from the visual languages of kitsch and craft, Emmica reclaims the decorative as a site of complex embodiment. Her practice, situated between sincerity and irony, troubles the cultural dismissal of objects and aesthetics coded as feminine, childlike, or low-status. Within The Other Room, Bunny becomes a shimmering provocation - a sculptural body that, like others in the exhibition, insists on presence, opacity, and the unruly politics of feeling.

Lauren Cameron’s ceramic vessels emerge as baroque reliquaries of psychic residue - morphing traditional forms like urns and vases into writhing, fragile, serpentine masses. Twisting with spikes, tentacles, and tendrils, these forms seem to erupt from within, bearing both the violence of rupture and the tenderness of repair. Her glazes bleed, crack, and glisten - surfaces charged with feeling, discomfort, and latent memory. Within The Other Room, these works channel the raw materiality of the abject and the eerie: domestic artefacts made strange, carrying pain just beneath their ornamental surfaces. In their silent convulsions, they echo Bourgeois’ spider - an emblem of entanglement, protection, and menace. Lauren’s ceramics invite viewers into uneasy intimacy, holding space for what cannot be fully spoken, only felt. They are vessels of resilience - gesturing toward the messy, ongoing labour of healing.

Emma Winkler’s work stages collapse as both comic spectacle and existential condition. In her hand-painted stop-motion animation It’s All Soup In The End, cartoon figures melt into gelatinous, primordial puddles, each frame rendered in thick, viscous paint. Here, the body is a site of relentless transformation. Comic, grotesque, and profoundly unstable. Evoking medieval allegories such as the Danse Macabre and the fool, the animation presents death and anxiety as cyclical processes - where dread and absurdity coalesce in a theatre of continual unravelling and metamorphosis. This entangled undoing spills outward, quite literally, in Rumination, Entropy, and Deathbed, three paintings reconfigured as vinyl banners affixed to the gallery’s exterior. As the first works encountered by visitors, they frame the exhibition as a porous architecture already in the process of coming undone. Within The Other Room, Emma’s work offers an absurd counterpoint to quieter explorations of loss and memory - a vision of subjectivity undone from within.

Together, the artists in The Other Room explore what happens when the self is not sovereign, when boundaries blur, and when we are shaped by forces - material, affective, spectral - that slip beyond our control. This is a show about the immaterial textures of interior life: the feelings we inherit, the structures we inhabit, and the haunted architectures we build to contain them.