Coalesce at KolbuzsSpace


Part of the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial 2024




R/evolution Series


Catalogue Forward


This singular exhibition presents the innovative practices of artists working within and beyond the craft space, with unique textiles by regional WA Aboriginal artists alongside contemporary ceramic works by two Walyalup/Fremantle-based artists.

Tom Freeman and Holly O’Meehan’s sculptural ceramics feature in parallel with textiles by Anita Churchill, Kelly-Ann Drill, Delany Griffiths, Dora Griffiths and Cathy Ward of Waringarri Aboriginal Arts. The Waringarri artists’ shift in 2024 to screen-printing is new: this is the première of their vibrant screen-printed textiles with the culturally significant motifs of the Miriwoong people. 

O’Meehan delves into the impact of colonial agricultural methods on the natural environment in WA’s Great Southern and South West Regions. She incorporates handmade clay and ceramic objects with organic material and discarded items.

Freeman playfully joins unconventional media to clay forms; exploring clay’s physical transformations that occur beyond his control. He adds found pieces from his daily life as an artist and parent to spur unexpected outcomes.

I am honoured to curate and present Coalesce with these artists at Kolbusz Space as part of the IOTA24 Festival.

Sandra Murray, Curator


Gallery view; foreground and wall right Tom Freeman, back plinth and back right shelf Holly O’Meehan.


Gallery view;  Tom Freeman far left and far right on the wall, Holly O’Meehan centred on the shelf.


Gallery view; Waringarri textile works along left wall, Tom Freeman along back wall and plinth.


Cataloge Essay

Catechism/Cataclysm


The sky is a big responsibility. And I am the lone intern. [i]
A crack in the pavement is all a plant needs to put down roots. [ii]

Coalesce means to grow together. This exhibition innovatively unites works that embody active switches from one artistic medium to another. The artists explore the flickering edge of translation: between craft and art, ceramic and painting, two-dimensional forms to three. Interweaving sculptures by Walyalup/Fremantle- based artists Tom Freeman and Holly O’Meehan with textiles by Miriwoong artists Delany Griffiths, Anita Churchill, Dora Griffiths, Kelly-Ann Drill and Cathy Ward, Coalesce is original, in many ways. This is the primary occasion contemporary Indigenous artists have exhibited at Kolbusz Space. The tropics of the north-eastern Kimberley to the southernmost plain of our state are referenced in the shared subject and iconography of flora yet this display is not about flowers.

Curator Sandra Murray has created an exhibition of firsts, and of the familiar. From Waringarri in Kununurra, WA’s first wholly Indigenous-owned art centre, artists branch into screen- printing: a newly explored technique, using ancient motifs from/ of Country.

Where languages [are] lost or endangered [...] craft communicates where words cannot. [iii]

There are fewer than twenty living individuals fluent in Miriwoong; most are aging. [iv] All Waringarri artists note the importance of Country, their elders, and storytelling as crucial to their practices. Their inclusion of symbols like bush plums, wattles and boabs reflects their living culture. These forms are both literal and spiritual foods, markers of identity, history, and belief.

The understanding inherent in a crafted object may take on new meaning as it is traded, from origin to end place. [v]

My first encounter with Waringarri art was by proxy: I worked in a gallery that sold the centre’s intricately carved boab nuts. Now, boab forms waver in cross-cut vibrant ink renditions printed onto textile lengths, another transformation through time and material. I am privileged to have accrued a more personal connection to, and knowledge of, their makers. I am no longer the lone intern, the polite desk attendant.

I met Dora Gerrgngarri Griffiths in 2020, at the opening for Boonkaj (also curated by Murray). Dora, whose language is Miriwoong/ Ngarinyman, began as an artist support worker, “helping all the old people mix paints.” Her mother is Peggy Griffiths; a successful artist in her own right, and in a local connection, the first Indigenous artist to win the Fremantle Print Award. Delany Ngugnuk Griffiths, Cathy Marawuk Binbirridj Ward, Anita Churchill, and Kelly-Ann Ngadjil Drill are her granddaughters.

Last year, Murray visited Waringarri, continuing to learn about the centre’s artistic developments. Constellations of relationships abound throughout Coalesce. Murray recalls her first encounter with Freeman was as Curator at Bankwest in 2015, when he was “a finalist with an innovative painting in the Bankwest Art Prize.” She then invited him to exhibit in Abstracted in 2019, for which Freeman created ceramics. For this exhibition, O’Meehan fired Freeman’s sculptures, sharing knowledge and kiln space. The two are colleagues, peers, friends. O’Meehan has also worked with Cathy Ward, via AACHWA’s Arts Worker Training Program. I first met Freeman briefly on the front desk as he returned equipment — at the same gallery that sold the boabs, whose makers were then unknown to me. Murray has mentored O’Meehan, and me, over the years. I could go on... Coalesce asks us to think about these stratas of memory; the labour/relationships between makers/ facilitators, equal to the newness contained within or produced by each material invention and the occasion of its display.

Now to defend a bit of structure: beeline, skyline, dateline, saline— [vi]

Coarseness, inquisitiveness, exuberance: to borrow from Robert Hughes,[vii] these qualities are shared between the otherwise (demographically, geographically, materially) disparate works. These objects hold in common earthen colours, distinct approaches to mark-making, and shared iconography. The circuitry behind them remains vastly different.

Freeman embraces artifice to relate to the natural world. Juggling family life, raising children, fulltime work, and maintaining his art practice, he creates what he terms “enjoyable and achievable” outcomes. There is an honesty to his works without immaturity: something in the compositions is both accentuated and effaced, simultaneously elevated and ruined.

No More Gaps, his children’s broken toy parts, crushed glass— the trace evidence of days spent renovating his home/studio, undertaking childcare or installing artwork show up in salvaged relics. Objects found buried in dirt on camping trips are unearthed, transported, and re-joined in strange, compelling compositions. Freeman describes these works as a method of painting, using the materials and processes of clay. Their subtractions — holes poked in with a domestic dishrack — are as deceptive as their additions.

Nostalgia resounds in Open up a packet of chips. An almost- neon, at least fluorescent, maybe chartreuse spray of paint covers a plinth; its edges iced with silicone filler. Chartreuse: a colour named from a secret recipe, comprised of over 130 plants, herbs and flowers, made by Carthusian Monks... plant, church, history... again, differently.

And Samboy chips! That unholy logo, blue comic speech bubble, echoed in the pointy shape Freeman has carved or assembled the clay slab into. The actual packet, heat-shrunk like a caricature of teenage delinquent-ism, literally beside itself. Next to a one-jawed mouth, replete with a row of little gapped teeth. The whole thing is like a miniature shrine or proscenium stage, a complete monster.

The pointy shape: technical term scream bubble. Popularised in last-century comics, the graphic’s origins reside further into our past visual culture, in the ‘speechbands’ (banners or scrolls) of mediaeval manuscripts and early Renaissance painting.[viii] God is talking; chips are screaming. Nice tingle and bad dread instead gives itself over to us in all capital letters.

The opposite appears in the meticulous, delicate hand-rolled forms of O’Meehan. Here is the tentacular, the cinereous, the glinting. For Freeman’s fluorescence, O’Meehan gives us inflorescence: connected to her childhood in the Great Southern. Hiding in Plain Site and Disguising Our Parasitic Tendencies reference the Southwest Christmas Tree (Nuytsia floribunda), a species considered both native and hemiparasitic. The plant attaches to other plants’ roots, flowers in December (Christmas time) and is endemic to WA. Growing up, I always mistook their yellow blooms for wattles, our actual state emblem. I once wrote about O’Meehan’s works as: “adorned with roots reaching ... and globular forms resembl[ing] plastic Christmas baubles. Their gold and green glaze glints with a scintillating attraction, giving way to surprise, horror and repulsion upon closer inspection, as the work seems to wrestle its way out of the soil”

— and, I would add now, almost out of itself. R/evolution further draws on categories of fecund and feral, the bulbous ceramic forms elongating to grow into something alien, into what O’Meehan terms a “speculative environment” comprised of “hybrids of native and introduced plants.” In these works, our nature/future doubles back on itself; it looks something like the present, it was corrupted in the past.

If, again pilfering a Hughes phraseology, the “Great Church of Nature” is our only human artistic commonality, then this exhibition invokes both its catechism and cataclysm. There are no easy harmonies, nor is there one voice that preaches or purports to be all-knowing. Coalesce gives us not what slips through the cracks, but what might grow inextricably amidst them... in between, despite, or because of, their very existence.

Aimee Dodds, July 2024


[i] Ben Lerner, the first line from an untitled poem in The Lichtenberg Figures, Copper Canyon Press, 2004, p16.

[ii] Richard Mabey, “Prologue” in The Unofficial Countryside. Little Toller Books, 2010, p19.

[iii] IOTA 2024 website: https://indianoceancrafttriennial.com/

[iv] See the Endangered Languages Project, created by University of Hawaii, University of Eastern Michigan, First Peoples Cultural Council and National Science Foundation.

[v] IOTA.

[vi] Ben Lerner again.

[vii] All quotes by Robert Hughes are from “Introduction: The Decline of the City of Mahogany” in Nothing if Not Critical, Harvill, 1991. ‘Circuitry behind them’ is another of his phrases. Hughes himself imported the first three adjectives, quoting from a text by Frederick Jackson Turner.

[viii] See works by Duccio c.1308 and Fra Angelico c.1450 for pertinent examples of speechbands.



Hiding in plain site I & II



This exhibition is proud to be part of the IOTA24 Festival, supported by Lotterywest. This exhibition is funded through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries for Creative Development.