Build your home

Build your home was a group exhibition which featured four artists from the Albury/North-East Victoria border region whom each have a wide focus in their art practice and chosen mediums. In preparation for this show, the Curatorial team undertook studio visits with Cornelia, Linda, Glenda, and Sharon. One remarkable similarity emerged.

Each artist had in some form built their own space. Shipping container studios, homes in the style of shedding, open air living pavilions, expansive studio construction projects and family living spaces remodelled as functional studios; these were the commitments that each artist had made to their arts practices, embedding their practice in their daily lives. There was a physicality to each of these approaches – a dedicated hands-on DIY.

In embarking on these building projects, each artist showed the vitality and centrality of their art making to their lives. They had each built their own space with the same vigour they applied to their work, linking life and work with absolute dedication.

About the Artists

Cornélia Selover is primarily a painter; also a clothing designer, sculptor, ceramicist, and musician. Her paintings are ambitious creations containing patterns and systems of reference that are simultaneously private, legible, deeply important to the artist, and under challenge in each work. These tensions play out in paintings that are generous yet guarded.

Glenda Helen Mackay is a maker of assemblages, drawings, paintings, and soft sculptures. In each strand of her work, she applies a rigorous set of ideas and aesthetic considerations that often manifest as grids. This is a technique with strong precedent in conceptual practices of the mid-1960s to 70s. Within these works the grid is an organising principle from which to explore personal narratives and colonial relationships to land and Country, with a material sensibility that draws from the discarded materials of regional life and a history of antipodean collage.

Linda Lees is also an artist with a wide focus. Lees works in photography, conceptually engaged community projects, and ceramics. The stoneware works from her Arcadia series set the material of rural environments in poetic pose – like small scale corrugated iron ballets. These beautifully made works sit alongside painted mounds, that condense the beauty of big sky sunsets into forms that recall the hills appearing where the great dividing range meets the plains.

Sharon McEachern is a ceramicist who is dedicated to advancing the medium. Her unique forms are the result of years of study culminating in intense research under generational porcelain masters in Jingdezhen, China. Knowledge gained from this research is underscored by a keen interest in our native flora and birdlife, combining in works that speak to a multitude of places, times, and experiences.