Join us for the Opening event at ANCA Gallery on Saturday 18 May at 2.00pm

Surface Tension by Sally Clarke and Brenda Factor runs from Wednesday 15 May to Sunday 2 June 2024.

A seashell collection that has remained packed for over 40 years provided a starting point for artists, Sally Clarke and Brenda Factor, to connect ideas around materiality, memory, place, beauty, value, desire, abstraction, symbolism and the ethics of collecting from nature.

Focusing on creating meaning through making, using a combination of found materials and objects as well as traditional art-making materials, the artists have produced paintings, moving images, sculptures, noisy shells and jewellery.

For both artists, who share a life and studio in Mittagong, the work is process-based—allowing one idea to be the catalyst for the next.

For Clarke, this exhibition marks the beginning of an ongoing project where methods or even rituals of processing, interpreting and reinventing become steps toward returning the shells to their various ecological or cultural origins. Mining representations of shells in art history with references to female art icons, such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, Clarke draws on her long-held understandings of the life & structure of molluscs to create abstracted forms.

Brenda Factor’s wearable enamels resemble the shiny desirous surface of cowrie shells imbued with notes of abstraction, as well as the beach-worn, weathered surfaces of broken shells that are part of the marine shore ecology. In the process, Factor thinks about the ways in which shells have been valued throughout history.

Sally Clarke, The Pale Carrier, 2022, acrylic paint on floor vinyl, 140 x 96cm

Brenda Factor, Margaret Brooch, 2024, vitreous enamel, copper, stainless steel, 5cm diameter