Sauerbier House Artist in Residence Exhibition, Port Noarlunga, 3 April - 4 May 2024
In 2022 I contacted the Onkaparinga Council regarding Wearing Street Precinct redevelopment. A key section of the project is to upgrade shelters. As a local resident and keen pigeon fancier I was curious if the upgrade would include housing for the pigeons under the Saltfleet Street bridge on the riverfront.
The project leader, Brian Fitzpatrick responded back to advise that this hasn’t been budgeted for, however if an opportunity arises, my suggestion may be taken into consideration in the future.
During the residency I welcomed the opportunity to project manage, research and connect with the local pigeons, developing visionary architecture of the ultimate pigeon palace.
Perched ceramic forms may be speculative or aids to my imagination, or representations of places either built or yet unrealised.
Each kite was carried against the wind optimistically pointing towards the sky carrying future architectural plans.
Images Andy Nowell
A group exhibition at Adelaide Central Gallery [co-curated by Nicole Clift + Andrew Purvis] 6th June - 14th July 2023. This exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with writing by Nicole Clift.
Open Book considers the artist’s studio journal as an active and reflexive element of artistic practice.
The scale of my notebook has a relationship to my body. A small notebook fits my chest pocket. This accessibility and portability, allows me to glean, write or draw my ideas down with a sense of speed and urgency as I move and navigate systems in the world. Movement is an important method in my practice. It helps structure my own knowledge of the world, space, time and relationship to others. Putting my body in the work allows me to search for my own language or code.
I have visions of building free-standing architectural structures, inspired by the dovecotes (pombals) in Lisbon, Portugal, doocots in Glasgow, Scotland, constructed with salvaged materials, and pigeon towers in garbage city where lofted structures rise up precariously on stilts in the trash-ridden outskirts of Cairo, Egypt.
Making architectural drawings, paintings, ceramics, and sculptures in cardboard, plaster and house paint allowed me to be unbounded by the practicalities of life size construction, this allowed me the freedom and flexibility to think and construct in three dimensions (visionary architecture). These works may be speculative or aids to my imagination or detailed representations of places either built or as yet unrealised.
Images Sam Roberts
Lucy Turnbull in collaboration with Kelly Reynolds, The Drawing Exchange, Adelaide Central Gallery, 4-28 October 2022
Responding to the theme of SITE, Lucy Turnbull and Kelly Reynolds developed ideas through drawing, clay and paper mache.
During the residency we learnt about the history of paper mache in architecture. We visited the neighbouring display showroom of developer Cedar Woods. We engaged in conversations with past and present CEOs about their visions for the school.
This led us to making paper casts of the concealed fixtures in the gallery, such as the fireplace cover, blocked windows, extended faux wall, taped over power points and light switches.
These paper forms became the display and models for our visionary architecture. Onsite moss housed in light switches transformed into green spaces, we welcomed possums and pigeons, former residents of the gallery building, back to their habitat and historical sculptural peacocks roam freely in our plans.
We are fringe dwellers, artists with shrimp savings. Utilising paper, glue and cardboard allowed us to be unbound by the practicalities of life size construction. The work made is our visionary architecture for the Adelaide Central School of Art site, an artist impression, things may change.
This show also featured site responsive works from Mark Valenzuela and Thomas Readett.
Images Sam Roberts, courtesy of Adelaide Central School of Art.
Lucy Turnbull in collaboration with Kelly Reynolds, Sauerbier House Artist in Residence Exhibition, Port Noarlunga, 24 September - 29 October 2022
Walking daily in close proximity to Sauerbier House, we notice building material, in particular bricks and pavers. These forms are embedded into the muddy walls of the Onkaparinga River, submerged in the soil of the walking paths, placed in the neighbouring sheoak forest allotment and precariously stacked under the expansive canopy of an old Port Jackson fig tree. We observe these sites housing a sense of play; a wonderland of makeshift spaces and hangouts through the serpentine sand dune paths.
Sauerbier House on Wearing Street, Port Noarlunga is known for recreational activities. By night the kayak club activates as a gym. Amongst the bicep curling activities, lies a stack of dumbbell shaped pavers buttressed against the back wall of the gym.
Thousands of years ago the ancient Romans paved a way forward in classical architecture utilising paving stones for their interlocking strengths. The paver speaks to us of strength and connection akin to a collaborative residency, where we have built a relationship with place and community.
Our ‘Rome’ wasn’t built in a day; these works were built over three months on a residency. Hidden away by the sea, this is where art and architecture meet.
Images Sam Roberts
Sasha Grbich & Kelly Reynolds
Installation, ceramic, sound, dimensions variable, 2021
Exhibited at Post Office Projects, Adelaide X, [curated by Suzanne Close] 26th Sep - 30 Oct 2021
Link to John Neylon's review of the work published by InDaily HERE
Images Rosina Possingham
During 2019 Kelly Reynolds and Sasha Grbich travelled in Europe. On the last night in each city we packed our bags and made a sound recording out of the window. These recordings have been pressed to vinyl and will be played back through the VERGEspace window, a different city recording played each week. These city soundscapes will also be walked through Adelaide on quiet evenings, played via cardboard box speakers carried on the backs of the artists; echoing the sounds of distant European cities within our home town.
Last Nights in Cities continues Grbich and Reynolds’s collaborative performative works in urban spaces. We welcome the opportunity to bring our practice home to Adelaide, to working with this city and with its inhabitants.
Sasha Grbich & Kelly Reynolds
Exhibited at praxis ARTSPACE, in On Being an Artist: 11 Actions [curated by eDuard Helmbold + Gabi Lane] July – 21st August 2020
For this work we have created and entered an ecology with stinging nettles. We used our bodies as barometers, we stung ourselves, monitored the nitrogen in our piss and watered them with it. We performed the plants in us.
Sasha Grbich and Kelly Reynolds, Sauerbier House 27 June - August 1 2020
We had initially proposed to explore architectural ruin and planned to challenge the Sauerbier House building by welcoming the power of the river and the creatures that inhabit its adjacent eco-systems. As our residency began, COVID-19 emerged and spread globally. We found ourselves starting a residency amidst lockdown. The emphasis in our work shifted dramatically as we responded to limited access to materials and our newly restricted mobility. We sourced objects from in and around our homes, performed on our rooftop and shared experiences through online social media platforms.
We used our residency to draw on any knowledge or method we could find to make sense of our COVID-19 experiences. We really wanted to leave the house. Developing alternative ways of travel, we investigated astral travel, psychic connection and time travel. Our title, Time Traveller for Hole, is a reference to the search for a wormhole that would take us out of this time and our homes.
Undertaking a residency during COVID-19 was an opportunity for us to think about alternative ways of making. We found ourselves working quickly, fluidly and often improvising. We worked more personally; our domestic spaces and personal objects have come into this work as never before. We have created objects for hope and change by turning the focus to our private worlds, where we looked for threads of connection as a way forward. The opportunity to continue our residency at this time re-enforced the importance of art in a crisis; the importance of contributing to culture in a time of upheaval.
While the theme of architectural ruin was somewhat left behind, the impermanence of structures is still an important aspect of the work. Crickets and nettles are welcomed to make home in the gallery space. The works acknowledge and responds to the colonial history of the building by seeking to destabilise its permanence. You might think of the body of work as a spell for change and a way of processing the changes the COVID-19 virus has catalysed.
Pigeon is a single channel video, artist book and pigeongram presented by FELTdark, October 2019 and supported through the Adelaide Central School of Art Graduate Support Grant.
I have been working daily and locally to befriend pigeons. I have sought advice from celebrities: former world boxing champions Mike Tyson, George Foreman (aka ‘Big George’) as well as Her Majesty the Queen of England. No reply from Mr Tyson, however Foreman suggested I read more and the Queen referred me to online resources.
My research included observing pigeons body language has led me to investigate: walking like a pigeon, cooing, feeding, sprouting my own bird seed, attempting a telepathic connection and commissioning a physic reading for a bird I met. Thus far, birdseed and telepathy are the only things that helped me to better connect with pigeons.
For my artist statement, on the opening night at FELTspace, I sent a pigeongram from Paris (as I was traveling). Attached to a homing pigeon’s leg in flight was a scroll containing the words ‘The Future is Pigeon’. This text formed part of the work and the letter was opened and read aloud by FELTspace director Bernadette Klavins.
An artist book accompanies Pigeon, view it HERE. Purchase enquiries can be made through the contact form on this website.
Link to catalogue essay by Sasha Grbich HERE
Link to my essay on the work published by Fine Print Magazine HERE
Kelly Reynolds, Sole Trader, paste-ups, dimensions variable, for Holy Rollers Studios as part of Psychache, 2018
Read a discussion of the work by Sasha Grbich HERE
Read legal advice from Fisher Jeffreies Barristers and Solicitors
Artist Statement
After finishing four years study studying full time at art school I was unemployed, poor and knee deep in student debt. I got on Centrelink. In the absence of a studio I made my work on verges – working out of my car with a salvaged tin of house paint and a borrowed camera.
Whilst unemployed I put myself to work writing my most private thoughts and experiences on soiled, hard rubbish mattresses. Sole Trader involves large-scale paste-ups utilising photographs taken during these improvised performances.
I am interested in the tensions that arise when engaging with waste, territory and ownership. Mattresses are like noticeboards; they are also cumbersome, hard to move and costly to dump. Those who put them out on the street are stuck with the burden of their waste and my heavy confessions.
Installation images by Sam Roberts
Kelly Reynolds, Verge, video performance, 12.21 seconds, 2017
Read the catalogue essay by Mary-Jean Richardson HERE
Documentation of the work installed in FELTdark, photo Steph Fuller.
Verge - 2 minute excerpt
Sasha Grbich and Kelly Reynolds, commissioned for ACE Open as part of ‘Plenty’, curated by Toby Chapman, 2018.
See the accompanying publication HERE - purchase enquiries can be made through the contact form on this website.
Sasha Grbich and Kelly Reynolds take as their starting point Sundrop Farms, located approximately 300km north of Adelaide on the Spencer Gulf. Sundrop Farms is a commercial greenhouse facility that uses an immense solar tower to produce energy to power the plant growing systems, as well to operate a cutting-edge thermal desalination plant, which provides water to crops. Sundrop Farms produces around 15,000, or 10%, of Australia’s tomato production, with all crops being supplied directly to Coles Supermarket chain.
With Urban Sun Project, Grbich and Reynolds intervene in the chain of mass-produced vegetables by propagating their own tomato plants from the seeds of a store-bought Coles varietal tomato. Outside of the highly-regulated and controlled context of the greenhouse, Grbich and Reynolds have invited participants to grow these seedlings in their own homes, or backyards, to explore what kinds of care are required to grow such a plant.
Here in the gallery, Grbich and Reynolds reference another site that was formative in the development of this project; their studio. You are welcome to take a tray of tomato seedlings, and try your hand at growing Coles tomatoes in your home, backyard, or a sunfilled corner of the city.
Text: Toby Chapman, images Sam Roberts
Kelly Reynolds, Free Ads, installation, discarded cardboard and packing tape, dimensions variable, 2017.
Artist Statement
For Free Ads I collected seller’s free ad descriptions online Gumtree. I was interested in gathering ads with ambiguous text. Not being able to identify exactly what the object is, the narrative opens to broader possibilities. Due to the scale of the work I found myself creating outside the studio. I discovered that when I had to bring the work back in I had no room. I often had to ‘drag’ the work behind me causing the work causing it to fall apart. The tape would stick to everything including itself causing the work to self-destruct whilst also holding itself together.
Kelly Reynolds, Free TV’s, video artwork, 10:50, 2017
Read the HATCHED catalogue HERE
Artist Statement
For Free TVs project I collected seller’s free TV ad photos from trade site Gumtree. I utilised my mac desktop mouse as my camera – I screen shot the ads and then cropped everything out except for the TV screen reflections. I was interested in the reflection of the private worlds of sellers and the space between what they were choosing to give to the public and what they don’t realise they are giving away. It was important the TV images were from the free category thus had ‘no value’ placed on them. The images I was drawn to were the ones that revealed sellers failed attempts to try to censor themselves, images that weren’t staged, were poor in resolution, were amateur and include everything or not enough.
Free TV’s 2 minute excerpt
See the hard rubbish booking HERE
Artist Statement
In the installation For Sale I collected found ads which led to the creation of life-sized domestic objects, made from cardboard sourced from furniture retailer dumpster bins. Each of the cardboard object were made from boxes that would have housed he domestic goods described in the ads. The ads I collected were for objects that people no longer desired, wanted or needed. Perhaps they had been replaced with a newer item, or didn’t work properly, either way they sit on the verge of abandonment and waste. I collected these objects like orphans to make a home for the unwanted, abandoned, injured and disused.
After installing For Sale as an installation as part of my honours assessment (see adjacent images) I was invited to participate in exhibition The Suburban Version curated by Jane Skeer and Cassie Thring. The exhibition was located at Jane Skeer’s house. At the end of my honours year I was overwhelmed by the burden of the cardboard life sized objects I had made. Participating in The Suburban Version allowed me to explore my relationship to my own artwork as it became waste. For the exhibition I organised a hard rubbish collection from Jane’s house and hauled For Sale there.
Image 1: Grant Hancock, all other images Kelly Reynolds
Group show exhibited at West Gallery Thebarton Gallery, 22 July - 22 Aug 2021, curated by Tara Rowhani- Farid
This world has turned to mud; I want to run from it, I want to tame it. The asparagus ships will save us. I am going to bed with a wetsuit on, having conversations with the deceased like a shipworm that is burrowing along the grain funnelling the shavings into its mouth and turning wood into both a protective shell and a meal. I return to the safe anchorage when it is daylight, to bladders with wings scalloped along their margins, to the filter feeders. I am a vampire in a mollusc's world, conquering the ocean (more than pirates). I am seeking a new world governed by my own rules, free from the restraint of another. The asparagus, the pigeon, the blood, the shipworm, bleeding teeth, crab claw and fish eggs travel with me, they are my talismans and my guides.
images Kelly Reynolds
