A Physical Reader draws together Nathan Beard, Sophie G. Nixon and Devi Seetharam, artists who look to gestures and adornment to manifest the sustained, yet often overlooked, cultural idioms that shape gender and sexuality. The artists pull on the threaded lineages and hierarchies that find form in the seemingly innocuous details of cultural vernaculars. Their painterly, image-based and material inquiries create aesthetic frameworks that re-read the inferences embedded in dress, the motion of a hand and textiles.
Curator - Jeremy Eaton
This exhibition is a part of CAVES Guest
Curator Program 2022 - and made possible with
support from City of Melbourne.
Nathan Beard is a multidisciplinary artist whose work draws from his Australian-Thai heritage to unpack the porous and precarious influences of culture and memory. Through the incorporation of exchanges with his family and archives alongside broader cultural signifiers of ‘Thainess’, Beard playfully express the complexities surrounding authenticity and diasporic identity.
Recent exhibitions include A Puzzlement, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2022), Husk, FUTURES (2022), Low Yield Fruit, sweet pea (2022), White Gilt 2.0, Firstdraft (2020), A dense intimacy (with Lindy Lee), Bus Projects (2019) and WA Focus: Nathan Beard, Art Gallery of Western Australia (2017). In 2022 Beard completed an Australia Council residency at ACME Studios, London. He has been a finalist in the Ramsay Art Prize (2021) and the Churchie emerging art prize (2020), and participated in the 4A Beijing Studio Program (2017). He is currently a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary.
Sophie G Nixon (they/them) (b. 1996) is a multidisciplinary textile artist with a Fine Art (Honours) degree based in Boorloo/Perth, and comes from a settler background. Sophie works primarily with second-hand textiles and occasionally plants to create soft sculptures and gentle installations. Methods of repair, transformation and ecological consideration of materials are central throughout their work. Currently, their focus lies in worn and damaged textiles, particularly garments and bedding, playing with pattern and composition to explore unconventional repair practices.
In 2022, Sophie held a solo exhibition titled ‘Many Threads’ at Cool Change Contemporary and participated in group exhibitions at CAVES gallery (VIC) and Ellenbrook Arts (WA). In 2021, from April to May, Sophie collaborated with Carissa Wu (Jotterbook Flowers) and Mikaela Miller as successful applicants for the City of Stirling’s first funded artists in residence program, at Mt Flora and Star Swamp bushland. In June of the same year, Sophie received the emerging artist award at the City of Belmont’s Art Awards for their assemblage titled ‘Pattern Making, Making Patterns’.
They have previously exhibited in group shows at various locations in Boorloo/Perth and Western Australia, including Mundaring Arts Centre (2019), Goolugatup Heathcote (2017), and the City of Perth’s James St Light Lockers (2017). They have also co-curated group exhibitions at Paper Mountain (2018) and PS Art Space (2021).
Sophie works from their studio at ROOK ARI in Carlisle, and is currently assisting with an event program at ROOK as part of The Town of Victoria Park’s 2024 Arts Season. Upcoming in May, they have an upcoming group exhibition at DADAA Fremantle
Devi Seetharam is an artist from Kerala, currently practicing in Bangalore, India.
She completed her BFA – Painting from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore 2011.
Before moving back to India in 2021; Devi grew up living in China, Cambodia, South Africa, India, Switzerland, Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, Mauritius, UAE and Australia.
Primarily a painter, she currently works with acrylic on canvas, using reductive techniques to create grain, texture and form. Thematically Devi explores the cultural psyche of the spaces she occupies.
Devi was shortlisted for the Incinerator and Darebin art prize and featured by KINGS gallery (Melbourne). She also participated in a three person show at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke (Mumbai) in 2020 and Lokame Tharavadu (Alappuzha) in 2021 curated by Bose Krishnamachari. She participated in the 5th Edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2022-2023. This was followed by Delhi Contemporary Art Week in New Delhi and Contextual Cosmologies in Trivandrum, both in 2023. Most recently, in 2024 Lon Gallery did a solo exhibition of her works at Sydney Contemporary.