Kate Ballis, Pounamu, 2023-24. Archival inkjet print on cotton rag, 150 x 100cm, edition of 8. Courtesy: the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide.

Hugo Michell Gallery presents an exhibition of works by Kate Ballis.

“In the liminal spaces where the ethereal touches the terrestrial, my infrared exploration of the South Island of New Zealand captures a world both familiar and otherworldly. As alizarin crimson mountains rise and teal waters mirror the rich deposits of pounamu (greenstone), these surreal landscapes bridge the realms of reality and myth.”

About this series, writer Dylin Hardcastle writes: “To find a home in Liminality, in the threshold of a horizon, between deep sky and wide lake, where the near and far feel not so far apart, is to surrender, voluptuously, to something felt. It is an ability to sit between regions – opaque and edged – and to feel, instead, the incredible release of shapelessness. If a binary is two sides of the same coin, Liminality, perhaps, is the coin in motion. It’s the spinning, the gliding, the orbit… Circles of memory and dreams that slip into the before and stretch out into the after. Where the present is both a collision and a reckoning… Of all that was and everything that will become. Because, to me, it doesn’t matter where I’m going, only that I’m going.

When I look at Kate Ballis’ Liminality Antipodes series, the works speak so deeply to my transness, to the home I’ve found in the slippages between what you see and what I am underneath. Because I exist otherwise – joyous in the calm of my own knowing, a reality that is felt more than it is thought.”

Opening Event: Thursday 27 June, 6 – 8pm.

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