Cristina Beth: Confession & Michelle Wilkinson: Micro

Opening in the Main Gallery
Saturday 20 July 3 – 4.30pm

Cristina Beth is interested in the notion of embodied repetition.  Beth’s work starts with the collection of discarded objects and materials from inorganic rubbish collections. The object that has become most representative of this reclamation for her is the fabric mattress cover. Once intimately private, it eventually becomes public and disowned; the mattress cover retains traces of wear and tear, traces of bodies and traces of absent identities. The stained or worn mattress cover represents a site where life and art, materiality and social form intersect.

Confession is an exhibition that focuses on the integration of place, self and each other. The mattress site carries within it the essence of our human fragility and becomes a confessional container for life’s dramas and emotions. Beth explores the relationship between fabric, intimate organisms and lingering memory by merging private and public boundaries.

Michelle Wilkinson’s work is based on observations of veiled beauty in the natural world. She is fascinated with the secret and unseen. Micro takes inspiration from elements in nature that are usually too small to be detected by the naked eye; objects that are often skimmed over and taken for granted. In this exhibition Wilkinson magnifies them to create jewellery that contains forms simultaneously familiar and unknown.

Looking to obsolete scientific theories and practices she focuses on the historic use of illustration to express scientific concepts. Her pieces are influenced by the descriptions and drawings in the pages of old scientific journals and biological keys.