Sundari Carmody

Exhibited at GAGPROJECTS, Adelaide, November - December 2023

Read the essay by Belinda Howden.

About the exhibition
Turns, Protracted, and Slow, is an exhibition of new work by Sundari Carmody. This is her first solo exhibition of sculptures at GAGPROJECTS, featuring a constellation of objects made from various materials, including neon, silk, opium poppy seeds, and hand-printed photographs.

The title of the exhibition, Turns, Protracted and Slow, is an indicator of her fascination with the intangible and the invisible, and the larger mechanisms of the cosmos. The essence of Carmody’s practice is charting the relationship between consciousness and the cosmos.

Neon light works are installed throughout the exhibition, ranging in form from minimal and linear to more gestural and intimate. These works give tangible expression to mostly fleeting or elusive perceptions of lightness, darkness, and the visible universe.

Carmody has been collecting sleep-bringing poppy seeds from her garden and suspends them in sheer silk organza pieces called Milky Way. Formally resembling lines of text on a page or black-and-white astronomical surveys.

Alongside these are hand-printed Gum Bichromate photographs that use the light of our nearest star, the Sun, to expose images of distant stars. The images fixed in the paper are historical astronomical surveys by significant astronomers William Herschel, Edwin Hubble and Vera Rubin.

There is considerable distance between the works in the exhibition, the emptiness in the gallery echoing the vast distances between astronomical objects and the spare quality of the work. In this exhibition, the artist invites the viewer to contemplate how our inner world, our consciousness, intersects with the outside world: water, birds, plants, and the sky.

Brass, electronics components, water, mist, and Mitti Attar oil

Installation dimensions variable. Individual elements: (Gate) 131 x 45 x 29cm; (Spring) 21 x 42 x 28cm; (Smell of Rain) 30 x 30 x 30cm

Fabrication: (Gate) by Exhibition Studios; (Spring) and (Smell of Rain) by Damon Hannon

Exhibited in Primavera 2022, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Curated by Micheal Do

The Mountain is a trio of brass objects, each with its own subtitle: (Gate), (Spring), and (Smell of Rain). The sculptures appear as brute yet ethereal formalist brass objects, resembling obelisks, fountains, and altarpieces - hinting at but not revealing a function. (Gate) and (Spring) hold space for water that is vaporised into mist using an ultrasonic mist-maker. (Smell of Rain) introduces an aromatique element using a perfume made in Kannauj, India, known as ‘Mitti Attar’, or the fragrance of wet earth after the rain. These activations soften the edges of the forms that now dissolve into the space surrounding them.

Mountains are the focus of pilgrimages of transcendence and spiritual elevation. The Mountain are artefacts from an unknown time with an unknown purpose. They hint at the past, the future, the scientific, and the spiritual. While looking at ancient ritual objects and sacred sites, I asked myself what a temple of the future might hold, what it might smell like, and what might it be dedicated to: formalist sculpture, geometry, electricity, rain? These forms attempt to collapse the distance between formalist/material concerns and ephemeral/conceptual realms to provide possible new vectors for human experience to encounter its cosmic dimensions.

steel, polycarbonate, LED lighting

Lot Fourteen, North Terrace, Adelaide

4.2 metres diameter

The piece was commissioned under the Lot Fourteen Arts and Culture Plan 2020, with advisory from Guildhouse, the Lot Fourteen Arts and Culture Advisory Group, and the Australian Space Discovery Centre.

Fabrication: Exhibition Studios

Photography: Sam Roberts

Read the essay by Belinda Howden

brass, 3D printed Ciconia ciconia (white stork) skull, magnetite rock

Exhibited in TarraWarra Biennial 2021: Slow Moving Water, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria. Curated by Nina Miall

In Sagitta and Cyclus, a mobile constellation ‘Sagitta’ (Latin for ‘arrow’) comprised of brass spheres and rods sits in a dynamic relationship to a circular brass ring. A facsimile of a white stork skull and a fragment of magnetite are poised at opposing points on the ring’s orbit. Esoteric logic underpins this apparently abstract arrangement of objects: in the early nineteenth century, storks injured by arrows while wintering in Africa helped shed light on the mystery of bird migration, while traces of magnetite found in the beaks of migratory birds are believed to act like a compass for their navigation in flight. Carmody’s suspended sculpture makes visible these ‘invisible’ phenomena and presents them in the enmeshed state in which we find them naturally, the intricacies of which still elude our understanding. Through illuminating these non-linear connections in ways that preserve inexplicability, she explores the contingencies and entanglements of these vast and complex systems, while also allowing space for the unknown.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The artist would like to acknowledge assistance from South Australian Museum staff Maya Penck and Dr Kyle Armstrong.

2020 South Australian Artist Survey, ACE Open, Adelaide, South Australia

Curated by Patrice Sharkey and Rayleen Forester

Essay by Annika Kristensen: Adjusting to the dark

List of works:

Lightwell I, 2020, Cast black concrete, 40 x 40 x 48

Stepwell I, 2020, Cast black concrete, 12.5 x 40 x 80cm

In the air (meteoron), 2020, Gold leaf on organza, 440 x 140cm

Orbis, 2020, Brass, 33ø x 1cm

Photo documentation by Sam Roberts

Neon light and electrical components
Each light is approx 15 x 30cm

Somnograph (Spring and Autumn Equinox) is a pair of neon lights, the linear forms of which were generated by using a sleep app. The app recorded the various depths of my sleep across two separate evenings and represented the information as graphs. Sleeping is a response to our circadian rhythm, which is connected to Earth’s movement around the Sun, which is in turn influenced by larger celestial systems. All living things respond to the amount of daylight they are exposed to, which changes day to day throughout the year. The selected recordings correspond with the nights of the Spring and Autumn Equinox. The equinox is when the day is equal to the night. Linking the sleep chart with an astronomical event like an equinox establishes a connection between consciousness and the vastness of seasonal rhythms and cosmological cycles.

PVC pipe, electrical components, water, melatonin, botanical oils, mist, dimensions variable

Essay by Madeline Reece: Out of Sight

Papaver Somniferum seeds in organza, 250 x 425cm

Whilst we are surrounded by the Milky Way galaxy and entangled within circadian rhythms, we are in a sense too close to see them. Night blooming plants are everywhere but we don’t normally smell their fragrance because we are out of sync with them temporally. This work is a result of ongoing botanical and cosmological research, which had as its focus medicinal and psychoactive plants, circadian rhythms, sleep, and the figure of Vera Rubin. Rubin was an astronomer who discovered evidence for the existence of dark matter.

Our galaxy, Milky Way, is sketched diagrammatically in a composition like an Agnes Martin painting. It’s there in my mind. Thousands of seeds from the Papaver Somniferum ’sleep-bringing poppy’ are held in rows of pockets sewn horizontally in an expanse of sheer white organza. Almost like lines of black text on a page. Also like black suns against a white ground, recalling the inverted photographic images of Andromeda from which the astronomer Vera Rubin made her surveys. The thousands of seeds in this work were gathered from poppies I’ve grown.

Exhibited at Seventh Gallery, Melbourne

Essay by Matt Barlow: 'An Invitation to Dwell in Darkness'

Steady Illiterate Movement presents a series of sculptures that have developed through a three-way conversation between theoretical cosmology, sculpture, and botany. The objects in this project orbit around the Papaver Somniferum, ‘sleep bringing poppy’, and the figure of Vera Rubin, an astronomer who spent many nights cataloguing the position and movement of stars around the Andromeda galaxy. Rubin is credited with discovering evidence for the existence of dark matter. The works are an attempt to give form to things that are invisible or which lie just beyond the limits of our perception. Steady Illiterate Movement explores altered states of consciousness, sleep and astronomy, the threshold between the seen and unseen - the known, unknown and unknowable.

In collaboration with Matthew Bradley

Exhibited in 'Climate Century' curated by Vitalstatistix, Port Adelaide

steel, aluminium, polyester organza flag, and wind, base and pole dimensions approx 600 x 240 x 320cm | flag dimensions 280 x 500cm

Exhibited at Bus Projects, Melbourne

Essay by Rayleen Forester: Primal Site

Growing up in Indonesia had an indelible influence on Carmody. Every aspect of life performed as ritual as much as lived. Passing ancient spirits cavorting in the streets, behind masks, dancing and singing; Disney and Vogue when she got home. On the edge of a volcano, masks around a fire, beneath the stars. A Eurasian Paleolithic tale unfolding deep, thousands of years old memories of ritual. It has all been filtered through the histories of art, music, literature, performance and couture culture. Precise, delicately detailed and nothing is explained.

Exhibited in 'CACSA Contemporary 2015' at SASA Gallery, Adelaide

Essay by Adele Sliuzas: Written Accompaniment to Longboard Sequence

“When I am sweeping the garden all I am thinking about is sweeping the garden”. (Buddhist Monk).

In Longboard Sequence, I am punting on top of a custom built black longboard, wearing a handmade black hemp-silk dress and custom-made shoes on my feet, holding a brass tipped oak pole with leather grip and tassel. The pole is used for ‘pricking’ the longboard, like one would a punt. Through a meditative approach to this action I am attempting to enter a state of being in which all the boundaries between myself and these elements are dissolved. There is a hint of narrative and deliberate intent yet ultimately this is an experiment in creating a narrative-less activity-based performance. No end point is ever reached.

The character in Longboard Sequence is an imagined one. It is a fictional character that I developed in the moments before I was falling asleep one night. I was thinking about sewing and thinking about movement and actions then this image formed in my head completely developed. It was not a narrative based character but a character performing a simple action in a loop. I decided to pursue this character. I spent the next few months bringing it together.

The development of this character from an imagined state to a realised one was precise and methodical. The rider of the longboard did not come from any story, era, or reference point that I consciously knew of.

With thanks to Beccy Bromilow of BB Shoemaker, Derek Sargent, Clarrie Lock, Carly Snoswell, and Matthew Bradley

ink and embroidery on felt, 250 x 250 x 60cm

An embroidery performance work, tracing the Southern Skies with white embroidery stitches.

Exhibited at FELTspace, Adelaide 2014 and Constance ARI, Hobart 2014

The starting point of The Black Swan project is a memoir I came across. In 1910 a Western Australian nurse working in the slums of Glasgow visited London to train forher certificate at the Central Midwifery board of England. During her stay, Elizabeth Grover witnessed the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary and then was recruited for a ‘monster march’ of the suffragettes in London. “We were delighted and found about ten women from WA with rods carrying the Black Swan. The march was five miles long, four abreast. What a sight.”

Elizabeth later volunteered for duty in the First World War. She cared for wounded Australian Gallipoli troops, worked in tent-hospitals in Egypt, and battled extreme conditions while caring for English troops in Salonica. She never married and died in Western Australia in 1973, she was 98. I am her brother’s great, great granddaughter.

This project is responding to the feelings generated by Elizabeth’s epic story. There are many gaps in the story and for me this is where the poignancy resides. Central to this project is a recreation of the black swan flag and performances of myself marching the flag while imagining the emotional experiences of her journey. The embellished navy canvas flag features a sequined black velveteen swan and is supported by a wooden structure like those carried by the suffragettes.

Exhibited at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia | Project Space, 2014

Essay by Danica van de Velde: The Erotics of Ambiguity

The Build Up is a sculptural installation that began as inspiration from the Jeffrey Eugenides novel The Virgin Suicides. Carmody worked loosely with this story which is a romantic tale of mysterious, unattainable, unknowable beauty inhabited by incomprehensible horror. Eugenides' novel, set in middle America, is subtly transformed through the perspective of Carmody's Indonesian upbringing. There are poetic substitutions of cultural signifiers out of which arises a curious cultural hybrid. Now it is a silent scene, a setting for a Eurasian gothic tale, the story lingers as a ghostly presence over this captured moment. The Build Up is a precise but delicately detailed circumscribing of the unknown presenting fragments circling an absence, and a loss of subjectivity. Something unknown is building up and lives teeter at the edge of annihilation.