DIGS

project8 is a new contemporary art gallery in Melbourne dedicated to promoting speculative poetic and material innovation through exhibitions and related events.

project8’s second exhibition uses the slang term for describing a home, “digs,” to broadly encapsulate the shared human desire to materially inscribe place into space. 

Curated by Cūrā8 (aka Kim Donaldson and Sean Lowry) and presented through the work of five artists—Laura Cuch, Spencer Harrison, Jaime Powell, Tariku Shiferaw, and Lisa Waup—DIGS speculates upon the nature of material expression and spatial arrangement in the formation of personal places of habitation. 

As a curatorial proposition, DIGS considers ways that spaces are provisionally and materially transformed into places using placeholders, architectural interventions, keepsakes, and décor. Echoing the broad human desire to create a sense of home, artists also creatively select, arrange, and manipulate objects drawn from the continuum of lived experience to create experiences of place that are delineated from everything else in the world. 

The artists presented in DIGS variously explore the materiality of placemaking through printmaking, film, drawing, painting, animation, sculpture, and sculptural installation, and in doing so, reflect something of their unique cultural and social backgrounds. How do we mark the places in which we sleep and eat? And in what kinds of ways do we ‘make do’ with that which is available to hand to construct a sense of home?

Laura Cuch, born in Barcelona and based in London, is a visual artist, researcher, and cultural geographer working with photography, film, and installation. She completed a practice-related PhD in Geography (UCL), exploring the relationship between food, spirituality, and everyday practices of faith in communities in West London.

Spencer Harrison is a visual artist whose work distils colour, form, and space into ordered abstract structures that reflect on our lived urban experience. His visual language draws on the world around us, referencing design, architecture, science, and the built environment.

Jaime Powell is an Indian-Australian artist who uses lithography and mark-making to investigate what our mind does when the body extends into space. The examination of belonging is at the heart of Jaime’s practice.

Tariku Shiferaw is a New York-based artist who explores mark-making addressing the physical and metaphysical spaces of painting and social structures. For Shiferaw, the act of making a physical mark is a performative utterance of his existence, which inevitably alters the immediate physical space and simultaneously introduces new ideas and boundaries.

Lisa Waup is a mixed-cultural First Peoples multidisciplinary artist and curator born in Naarm (Melbourne). Waup’s practice spans diverse media including weaving, printmaking, photography, sculpture, fashion, and digital art.

Cūrā8 is a curatorial collective created exclusively for project8 by Kim Donaldson and Sean Lowry. Functioning in a dynamic and mutually responsive relationship between the roles of artist, curator, producer, and theorist, Cūrā8 is committed to promoting aesthetic concerns such as poetic and material innovation in contemporary art and curatorship.  Donaldson and Lowry have worked nationally and internationally for over three decades and are both senior artist academics and program leaders at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Having independently developed and tested their ideas across a diverse range of artistic, scholarly, curatorial and professional environments, Donaldson and Lowry have joined forces as Cūrā8 to cultivate new artistic and curatorial partnerships between local and international artworlds and research cultures.

project8 acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as sovereign custodians of the land on which we work and welcome visitors, who have cared for Country and culture over millennia, and continue to do so. We extend our respect to ancestors and Elders past and present, and to all First Nations people.

project8 Wurundjeri Country, Level 2, 417 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria, 3000 Australia. 11am–6pm, Wednesday–Saturday.