This year, the theme for ‘the churchie’ is context. What does it mean to introduce this theme into the white-cube gallery—a space designed to isolate art objects and their audiences from the relationships that inform and sustain them?

We are all implicated in a relationship with place. In various ways, the artists in ‘the churchie’ exemplify our entangled, complex relationship with where we live and work in Australia. At a time of environmental, social, cultural, and political crises—many tied to our continuing colonial history—they ask us to expand the principles of care that museums and galleries apply to objects, to encompass people and Country.

Positioning art within a socio-historical conversation that extends beyond art history, the exhibition also provides the artists an opportunity to think about how their practice might sustain them, both within and without the art industry. As emerging artists, this second point is important in counterbalancing the ideas of competition, professionalism, and careerism that historically inform art prizes.

ALREY BATOL and RAF MCDONALD make art in their backyards on Wurundjeri Country, using freely available natural materials. In the DIY tradition, Batol builds rocket stoves and potbelly heaters, from materials to hand: clay, grasses, and scraps of metal. His burners embody our relationship to place and natural resources, literally burning raw materials to create energy. McDonald buries large textile works in the ground, where they are marked and stained by metals and microbes in the soil—a gesture that recognises the generative, creative potential of Country as an artistic collaborator. The act of digging into Country from a settler position is complex. McDonald asks: What is the significance of having a creative practice on stolen land; to make work in the context of an unpayable debt?

Art practice is inherently linked to particularities of time and place. JESS TAN is specific about the provenance of the materials she uses in her associative works, which demonstrate the poetic potential of materials in slow flux. She likens her activity to an ‘endless circulation of slow digestions, regurgitation, indigestion, and redigestion’ of material. This outlook can also be found in LUKE BRENNAN’s paintings, which mimic the processes of deterioration, germination, and growth that occur in the natural world. While Brennan employs this strategy as a means to erase evidence of the artist’s hand, Tan understands her works as temporary accumulations and combinations of matter. Working in this way, both resist notions of artistic genius that position artists as creators rather than as manipulators of matter, undermining their authorship and the institutional structures that reify this authority.

Over the last few years, JOEL SHERWOOD SPRING has provoked us to consider what it means to live on sovereign land—his practice has been significant in my thinking about this exhibition. Sacred Country and its instrumentalisation within a colonial context are at the heart of his video work Diggermode, which poses important questions about our relationship to the resources we utilise under extractive capitalism. For Spring, the evacuation of natural resources for industry must be urgently rethought through a First Nations worldview. ASH TOWER also finds expression through a material engagement with place. He is interested in the material history of atomic technology. By rendering drone-viewfinder imagery in lead, he links Australia’s legacy of nuclear-weapons testing and the global nuclear industry that is literally fuelled by raw materials found in the ground. One such material is uranium, used in the production of nuclear power. It is abundant in Australia, which holds around a third of the world’s deposits.

DEBBIE TAYLOR WORLEY and CORBEN MUDJANDI demonstrate spiritual connections to place. Taylor Worley created her works on Gamillaraay Country, her birthplace, in collaboration with natural forces. Her paired canvases bear direct traces and rubbings from nature. In each pair, one panel was created at points in and alongside significant waterways on Country, the other at trees nearby. Mudjandi was born in Darwin, and, in his younger years, moved with his family between Jabiru, Barunga, Darwin, and Katherine, eventually settling on Mirarr land in Jabiru, Kakadu National Park, where he is a traditional owner. His dramatically lit photographs appear stylised, in the manner of the video games and popular culture he consumes. They communicate experience of idle time, travel, and isolation, as a condition of settling into a new place or of life on the move.

MELODY PALOMA’s video Kitsch Sites combines archival and new footage to consider the Snowy Mountains Scheme, the largest modern engineering effort on this continent, which transformed the living, material makeup of Southeast Australia. Paloma investigates the promotional imagery surrounding the Scheme, which aestheticises nationalistic tropes: nation building, multiculturalism, exploration, and collective labour. Such propaganda deadens our capacity to actively oppose large-scaled, state-sanctioned change, by obscuring our connection to what is at stake.

This idea sits at the heart of our theme—context. Art is inextricably connected to the material reality of the places where we live and work, but it communicates through representation and symbolism. Artists and art institutions may master rhetorics of transformation and progress, but, if they only work for change on a symbolic level, we will only get symbolic change. In a recently colonised country, where our biggest issues stem from the theft of land and its resources, understanding our material relationship to place through nuanced First Nations and settler perspectives is paramount.

Working at the intersection of art and architecture, DYLAN BOLGER demonstrates the differences between symbolic and material approaches to transformation. His large, labour-intensive painting represents the internal structure of a macaranga leaf, a motif he plans to use many times across a variety of forms and contexts. While the leaf symbolises resilience in the wake of devastation—colonial, ecological, or both—the painting itself is made of paint and plywood. What raw materials were these made from? Where did those materials come from? And what context necessitated their transformation? These are important questions to consider, if we are to reframe our relationship to sovereign lands on this continent. Working as an architectural technician, Bolger also presents his leaves outside, like actual leaves, in wall murals in public spaces around Brisbane, in an explicitly material negotiation between art and place—architecture exemplifying the manipulation of materials to suit our needs and desires under capitalism.

Artists often critique public institutions as embodiments of dominant social-belief systems. AMANDA BENNETTS is critical of medical institutions for the way they conduct research into disability in a society that asserts wellness as normal. Her polished, clinical, and, at times, uncomfortable installations challenge the way we position people living with chronic disabilities as being in a state of stasis or decay. Their vilification and invisibility exemplify a culture of disposability enshrined across our public institutions and perpetuated through institutional thinking. MATTHEW BROWN looks to subvert such logics as they are practised in museums. He explores the disruptive possibilities of subjective, fan-oriented modes of collection—predicated on internet use—in relation to institutional archival practices and modes of display. His work undermines museum aesthetics by making the context of the collector’s world key in understanding archives and collections.

ROBERTA JOY RICH’s Lunch with the Family at Mignon Street, Cape Town considers apartheid as a systemic framework, applied in places throughout the world. It relates the experiences of her family under the South African apartheid system, especially within District 6— an inner-city residential area of Cape Town, from which thousands of First Nations people, black people, and people of colour were forcibly removed from the mid-1960s into the 1970s. The setting for this intimate conversation—recorded more than a decade ago—is bathed in purple light. This light refers to Rich’s earlier work The Purple Shall Govern (2022) and the historic anti-apartheid 'Purple Rain' Protest in Cape Town on 2 September 1989. By couching an acute moment of political transformation within a longer, intimate reflection of life under apartheid, her work argues that change is possible through active public participation. Presented in Australia, the work prompts us to consider the legacy of racialised hierarchies here, and our capacity to collectively engage and radically alter them.

The late Australian philosopher and ecofeminist Val Plumwood wrote about ‘shadow places’, whose complete destruction supports the functioning of metropolitan centres. If ideals of care and preservation expounded within museums require cultural material to be wrested from the places and relations that sustain them, what are the implications for those who make them and the places they come from? We cannot survive without the nourishment provided to us by the earth, and we cannot carry out the work we do without our connection to place.

Global capitalism requires instrumentalising raw materials on individual and mass scales. Artists are interesting figures within this, as their research finds expression through the explicit manipulation of matter. Despite this, art is often merely symbolic. However, through their materials, their research, the places they work, and the audiences they address, the artists in ‘the churchie’ connect to the cultural, social, economic, and historical conditions that shape our lives, here, today. I hope the exhibition makes these connections explicit, as a means to reframe our potential to work in the interests of this place.