Jerico Contemporary is pleased to present Jedda-Daisy Culley’s first solo show with the gallery, Printers and Portals. The show opened on Thursday the 4th of July and continues through to Saturday the 20th of July 2019.
Printers and Portals is a multidisciplinary show framed by the theme of the infinite Australian landscape, which has been fundamental to Culley's former bodies of work. Printers and Portals explores the concept of the female body as a printer and portal, a vessel of creation that melds with the earth and cosmos. The female body is often reduced to its biological function, to its ability to translate genetical data and star dust into life. As a conduit of creation herself—for both art and life—Culley’s latest body of work explores themes of expectation, birth, motherhood, and shines light on the insurmountable feeling of losing life data mid-transmission.
“This body of work grew from a place of sorrow. I was processing loss. I was feeling it leave my body,” Culley explains. “My watercolours were like a map I drew. Navigating the way through, I felt like a portal for change. I saw an in an out. Change is like life and death, there is a beginning and an end and there is always a newness that’s left behind. I let something go. I invited it in but then I chose to let is pass through me. This show is a self-portrait. It’s how I felt at a vulnerable moment.”
The exhibition brings together two large-scale, handmade weavings, 12 watercolour paintings, and a video work. Each medium engages together in a collective dialogue about release, longing, transformation and disappearance—and the underlying tensions between them.
The exhibition is centred around the two weavings. Created using a repetition algorithm, the weavings wield a deafening loudness, exclaiming ‘CALM’ and ‘YOLO’, two words Culley found to be riddled with anxieties; particularly as a new mother. Playing on meme culture and dismissive sayings that pervade the discourse of contemporary society, Culley reverts their throwaway effect by hand weaving them into tangible matter. Culley explains they are ‘blankets of gentle protest for a softer approach when we a talking to ourselves and each other’. In keeping with the slow, introspective process of weaving, Culley says she wanted to choose two ‘overwhelming ideas to meditate on’.
Accompanying the exhibition is also a text, a book created between Culley and her friend, writer Anna Harrison. Titled, Time Runs In and Then Runs Out, the book is a thoughtful compendium of Culley’s artworks and Harrison’s musings, which work together to address the Australian landscape as a feminine entity and urge readers to contemplate the ongoing issues that threaten its wellbeing.
Printers and Portals seeks to create meaningful discussion about our fears and failings that we too often harbour inside. Through this exhibition, Culley coaxes out these emotions and imprints them in the world around her, creating an open void for us to enter, experience, and relate to.