In The Skin of Things, Chelsea Lehmann draws on the pastoral and the language of historical painting to explore what might lie beneath familiar images of landscape, care and belonging. Informed by the Australian Gothic and her idea of para-history painting, the works allow fragments of inherited imagery to resurface in altered and unstable forms.

Figures, animals and landscape become entangled through layered painted surfaces, shifting between tenderness and unease. In one work, the figure of the shepherdess — traditionally associated with pastoral order and care — becomes a figure of protection in the face of gathering environmental and political uncertainty.

The paintings ask what might draw us back to such images now, and what they can reveal beneath the skin of things.

This series explores the narratives inherent in collected post-colonial debris. Gathered and gifted artefacts are printed onto cloth in arrangements akin to jewellery archetypes to map sites where the human and non-human coalesce, where the manufactured object is in the process of being reclaimed by Country. Made using scrap wire, rusted domestic and industrial objects from Dharawal, Yungnulgra, Wilyakali and Barkindji Country in NSW; rust and the process of rusting rather than the objects themselves ultimately form the response to the transformation of these places through colonisation. Through engagement with an unpredictable material process, the works speak to my interest in the ‘trace’ and how the artefacts can reflect the domestic narratives and ghosts of specific collection locations; whose recent histories of extractive mining (including silver, opal and coal) supersede their pre-colonial significance in the popular post-colonial imagination.  

 With the exception of the wire drawings, there has been minimal interference in the objects transition from rubbish to ornament - they are used as they have been found. The cloth used speaks to the domestic feminine and bodily interaction; cottons, calico, muslin have been torn to tea-towel scale, other works use thrifted embroidered and lace-edged handkerchiefs or napkins.  The printing process renders the cloth unstable and in a constant state of change, rust flakes and earth from the place of collection are shed onto the cloth, which stands in place of the wearer’s skin.

The rusted artefacts have been contact printed on to cloth which is laid over the objcts like a skin and soaked using white vinegar and black tea. The marks created by the process speak back to the leaching of rust into the earth, each successive soaking during the printing process leaves a new stain reminiscent of the geographic topographies and colours of the landscape. The work is delicate, like the environment - the touch of a body has the potential to stain the cloth, to transform it further through interaction, thus becoming part of the trace-history of the original objects.

The work asks the viewer to imagine the experience of an intimate interaction with the objects via these charged cloth skins; to consider the troubled relationships and ghosts of place.

At the centre of Tracey Jones's practice is her relationship to objects, employing them to engage memory as a means to further explore themes of absence, connection and belonging.

When she looks at an object she sees beyond its form. What appears before her is a collection of short, fast images, echoes that play on its surface like a metaphorical skin.

It is these concepts that are at the foundation for this body of work. Using objects and paint  as tools for remembering, Jones uses both prosaic and culturally familiar items composed in ways that describes the visual surface while acting as conduits that invite the viewer to access their own memory and imagination.