Curated by Amy-Clare McCarthy and Kieran Swann

Join us and artist Caitlin Franzmann for one-on-one divination readings throughout the eve from 5pm and Naomi Blacklock for a live performance at 6.30pm
Exhibition continues until 19 August

NETHERWORLDS are grappling at the corners of the everyday, carving sanctums, thick with power, love, and potential. Through object and performance, this exhibition claims space somewhere between contemporary art, the spiritual, and othered identities and behaviours.

Informed by emergent contemporary relationships between ideas of magic, mysticism, cultural ritual, and art making, NETHERWORLDS reflects on theories of early performance as invocational ritual, and prehistoric art as sympathetic magic (first proposed by ethnographer Richard Andree). Drawing on ideas of communitas, perceived and actual power, NETHERWORLDS foregrounds contemporary perspectives on the crafting of safe space and the empowerment of artists through ritual and talisman on creative contexts.

Through her sonic practice, Naomi Blacklock subverts the history of her gender and cultural identity as ‘othered’ via accusations of witchraft or exoticised as ‘mystical’; Anastasia Booth embodies the subversive and mythological ‘Baubo’ – comic, lusty, and lascivious; Chantal Fraser questions the milieu of art, culture, and adornment; Caitlin Franzman explores the role of the diviner to work with methods and symbols of ritual in contemporary work; Clay Kerrigan melds artistic process and goetic ritual to craft collage-portraits; and Blake Lawrence considers images and encounters of men who have sex with men through the lens of natural spiritual practice.

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