Like conscious glitches in the layers of memory, where desires and imagination fill in the blanks of the ever inconsistent fragments from the past, the exhibiting artists navigate the intimacies, intricacies and inconsistencies of previous experiences to reclaim personal narratives, exposing in the process, some of the grounded values that define their art practices. Encompassing a broad spectrum of mediums and approaches to art-making, from photographic methodologies to ceramics; and painting to soft sculptures, the exhibition encapsulates the many ways in which we interact with domestic environments, neglected ordinary landscapes and seemingly mundane objects.   

Living and working on Gadigal land, the Indian-Romanian Australian artist Monica Rani Rudhar explores the notions of grief and longing associated with cultural displacement. Rudhar's tactile art-making methodologies enable her to reconnect with the domestic, artisanal, and medicinal practices present in her family's history while recalling the emotional ties that weave together the tissue of her heritage. In 'They tell me not to forget', 2021; and 'A Scent That Fills All Spaces' 2021, two delicate ceramic water vessels evoke the body engaged in domestic actions—the filling and carrying of the vessels. Featuring arch-shape tiny holes that resemble architectural features of decorative niche walls or even windows, the vessels, with their luxury golden lustre glazed surfaces, nod to the interconnection of Rudhar's practice with a lineage of gold jewellers. As vivid telegrams from the past, the work 'Drawing The Curtains' transverses time restaging the aromas of the artist’s childhood home and the smell of her parents' cooking. Assembled as a curtain-like wall hanging, the work engages with the aesthetic qualities, texture and scent of traditional southwest Asian spices and traces back to Ayurvedic therapies commonly practised by the artist's ancestors. Drawing on her own family history, Rudhar works serve as an archival and oral testimony that aim to preserve intergenerational knowledge in the context of diasporic movements. 

Monica Renaud, a photographer at the core, mother, museum worker, feminist. Her enigmatic and elusive abstract compositions are the poetic outcome of a continuous exploration of domestic environments. Sharing parenting commitments and homeschooling Renaud's imagery is an ever-insinuating, sassy and critical celebration of the mother/artist status. The boundaries of her studio practice expand and contract as she moves around her house, learning and experimenting from camera-less image-making and post-pandemic motherhood in equal amounts. Anything inside the house could potentially become an artefact, a triggering device of an artwork concept. The smooth concrete surface of the skate park where she takes her offspring for playtime, the kitchen table where she chops vegetables for the evening meal, the polished glass of her new flatbed scanner where she magically renders the analogue a flattening picture plane. For this exhibition, the Björk-inspired 'I play dead' diptych is the result of a performative action choreographed with a striped ribbon gifted to her on the occasion of her 47th birthday. A chance byproduct turned into the subject. Captured with camera-less techniques, the final and carefully considered multilayered composition resonates as the gestural study of the exquisite and meditative possibilities that everyday objects and household vernacular can offer to the gods of abstraction. The luxury of golden ribbons!

Making an outstanding appearance in the last MFA grad show at the National Art School, the French-born Sydney-based artist Camille Gillyboeuf makes her presence resonate at pompom with three works that continue her interrogation into the dichotomy of childhood/adulthood. Working across charcoal drawing, sculpture, and installation, Gillyboeuf's practice gravitates towards examining the many contrasting elements that coexist when engaging with transitional objects, particularly the 'doudou' (meaning comfort-object in French). Gillyboeuf’s imaginary landscapes and felt assemblages evoke feelings of innocence, security and wonder alongside fear, loss and discomfort. They require contemplation and closeness in a world that screams for distance and solitude. While seducing you with the possibility of tactile experiences, the smooth render of charcoal on paper and raw felt tap into the echoes of the unconscious mind, distilling in the process the notions of becoming and belonging through place and time.

Working across various mediums —from oil painting to animation—Alex Karaconji obsessively documents the generally overlooked moments of everyday life. Referencing the 19th-century figure of the 'flaneur', a solitary bohemian, observer type immortalised in the words of Charles Baudelaire, the Sydney-based artist fixes his hi-res peripheral view to the surroundings establishing a witty yet poetic sensibility with the mundane. For this exhibition, Alex borrows from the stylistic narrative units of the comic book to create a meta vignette with two paintings depicting domestic subject matter —Sydney Park— and two watercolour drawings referencing the lived experience of painting them in plein air. Acting as post-it notes, the drawings present themselves as an alternative to embodied storytelling and as a solution to relieve one of Karaconji's current creative concerns, 'how to convey a layered narrative in a single image?'.

On the one hand, what Confabulations ultimately celebrates is the opportunity to observe the typical as an intimate journal, as a literary form, not as a monolithic statement addressing the aesthetics of the world under existential threats but rather as an open-ended proposition in which opposites and contradictions find common ground, as a fluid assemblage of possibilities. On the other hand, this exhibition as a format acknowledges the relevance of expression platforms for emerging artists and curators to work together and experiment with more complex and diverse ways of feeling and thinking; to confabulate, to imagine plausible and more optimistic present times.   

Felipe Olivares, August, 2021

Artwork images by Felipe Olivares

Installation images by Docqment