If These Walls Could Talk - A solo exhibition
Echora, Sth Murwillumbah
This December, I will be showing a new body of work at Echora in South Murwillumbah. The exhibition brings together Petit Assembly with new works that explore place, story, absence, and memory.
Five chairs sit in quiet dialogue, each a marker of place and time. Four are mine, gathered second-hand, already carrying stories I can only guess at. The fifth remains in my childhood home, a house now empty but still alive with memory.
For me, a chair is never just furniture. It is a witness, a vessel, a stand-in for the lap of a mother where a child was once held. The mother’s lap as the first world, the first resting place, the place where the self is gathered. These chairs extend that image — they cradle lives through joy and through grief, through birthdays, exhaustion after work, or evenings when the house has finally gone quiet.
Bachelard writes that the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. In the same way, each chair shelters memory — it holds its sitters and, in return, is shaped by them. Even when left behind, the presence remains. Van Gogh painted his own chair and Gauguin’s chair as portraits of absence and self, claiming he was painting “the soul of a chair.” I feel the same with these works: each chair becomes a portrait of the unseen lives it once carried.
The new works bring in layered symbolism and take inspiration from the walls of Echora itself — its textures, its weathered surfaces, and the surrounds that hold stories of their own. Installed within this space, the works open a dialogue between the seen and the unseen, between what is remembered and what quietly slips away.
I am grateful to Echora for the opportunity to collaborate in such a resonant and layered setting.
Five chairs sit in quiet dialogue, each a marker of place and time. Four are mine, gathered second-hand, already carrying stories I can only guess at. The fifth remains in my childhood home, a house now empty but still alive with memory.
For me, a chair is never just furniture. It is a witness, a vessel, a stand-in for the lap of a mother where a child was once held. The mother’s lap as the first world, the first resting place, the place where the self is gathered. These chairs extend that image — they cradle lives through joy and through grief, through birthdays, exhaustion after work, or evenings when the house has finally gone quiet.
Bachelard writes that the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. In the same way, each chair shelters memory — it holds its sitters and, in return, is shaped by them. Even when left behind, the presence remains. Van Gogh painted his own chair and Gauguin’s chair as portraits of absence and self, claiming he was painting “the soul of a chair.” I feel the same with these works: each chair becomes a portrait of the unseen lives it once carried.
The new works bring in layered symbolism and take inspiration from the walls of Echora itself — its textures, its weathered surfaces, and the surrounds that hold stories of their own. Installed within this space, the works open a dialogue between the seen and the unseen, between what is remembered and what quietly slips away.
I am grateful to Echora for the opportunity to collaborate in such a resonant and layered setting.