Michael Carney, Low Signal

Magali Gentric ·

UPCOMING EXHIBITION in GALLERY TWO

14 March / 19 April 2026
opening: Saturday 14 March, from 4 pm

MICHAEL CARNEY
Low Signal

This exhibition presents a suite of ceramic sculptures and paintings that draw from several visual traditions, including sublime landscape painting, surrealism, ecclesiastical architecture, and classical antiquity. These traditions use atmosphere, scale, and symbolism to pull at emotional and spiritual registers.

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The show’s title, Low Signal, comes from the atmospheric qualities of the first painting completed for the exhibition, Soft Meridian. The mountain scene carries a sombre but luminous mood, a quiet sense of melancholy within an otherwise pastoral landscape. The phrase “low signal” suggests a weakened transmission, something distant or partially received. In the context of the exhibition, it speaks to the dreamlike quality of the works, as if the landscapes exist slightly out of contact with the world.

The oil pastel landscapes unfold in soft, hazy colour. Their pastel palette creates a sense of calm that can feel almost utopian, yet the scenes remain subtly uncanny. Gravity, perspective, and logic appear slightly unsettled. These environments feel both recognisable and invented, as if they belong to a larger narrative world. The images operate almost like storyboards, fragments of a place that extends beyond the frame.

Alongside the landscapes are ceramic candelabras that reference classical and religious forms. Their silhouettes recall traditional decorative objects, yet their surfaces appear to melt, erode, or grow outward. Ornament softens and collapses into new shapes. These sculptures echo the landscapes by presenting familiar archetypes in a state of transformation.

Across the exhibition, landscape and objects share a common atmosphere. Natural scenery and architectural forms are filtered through a soft, dreamlike lens. What remains is a world that feels suspended between beauty and distance, where signals from familiar cultural and natural forms arrive slightly faded, unstable, and open to interpretation.

 

Michael Carney b.1983 is an interdisciplinary installation artist, based on Kaurna Country, working across painting, ceramics, digital media, and installation.  His practice explores ontological and metaphysical questions through a blend of traditional craftsmanship and technological experimentation.

Carney holds a Masters of Visual Arts (Research) in 2016 following from his Bachelor of Visual Arts with Honours in 2012, from the University of South Australia. For this, he was awarded the National Campus Art Prize for Painting and runner-up for Sculpture.
Post-graduation, Carney completed a residency in Jingdezhen and an associateship at the JamFactory. In 2022, he was awarded the Catapult mentorship from the Guildhouse and received an Arts SA grant for a touring exhibition. In 2024, his work was collected by Artbank.
Carney’s work has been featured in several art publications, including Artlink and the Journal of Australian Ceramics.

Pip Ryan, Hot Mess

Magali Gentric ·

UPCOMING EXHIBITION in GALLERY ONE

14 March / 19 April 2026
opening: Saturday 14 March, from 4 pm

PIP RYAN
Hot mess

What happens when you don’t sleep for two years? You begin to live in a world that is in-between, where time moves painfully slow and impossibly fast all at once, where you are never fully awake or fully asleep. When you don’t sleep for two years, you don’t simply become tired, you become hollow.

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Sleep Deprivation, 2026
watercolour, gouache, pencil on paper, framed with non-reflective glass, 12.5 x 7.5 cm

Hot Mess is a new body of work, which includes sculptures and works on paper. These works grew out of a period of rupture, taking inspiration from the physical and psychological landscape of postpartum delirium. After giving birth, I found myself inhabiting a body that felt both ravaged and newly formed.

Working intuitively the figures I’ve created feel as if they are becoming something, or perhaps are coming undone, humorous, tender, grotesque and absurd. Through these works I want to explore transformation not as a clean transition but as something messy, bodily, and unfettered.


Pip Ryan is an Australian artist based in Narrm/Melbourne. Her practice explores humour, irony and the absurd through drawing, sculpture, installation and video. Her works present a multitude of imagined creatures and characters including hybrid animals, disembodied figures and darkly comical beasts. Ryan is interested in using colour and playful forms to engage with dark and surreal subject matter, exploring the junction between the personal and the imagined world. She also collaborates with her sister Natalie Ryan exhibiting under The Ryan Sisters.


Plant Life

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, all galleries
24 January / 1 March 2026

Plant Life

Sofi Basseghi, Steven Bellosgardo, Kris Coad, Amber Cronin, Rhett D’Costa, Beverly Downs, William Eicholtz, Peter Ellis, Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Clare McCracken & Heather Hesterman, Anthea Kemp, Sara Lindsay, Sally Mannall, Julie Millowick, Betty Mula, Laetitia Olivier-Gargano, Petra Rodgers, Sarah Rudledge, Jason Waterhouse, Lisa Waup, Rosie Weiss

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Exhibition Statement:

 

It’s been days and she hasn’t moved. She just stands in the backyard. She says she doesn’t need anything, that she’s drawing water from the air and the ground and her energy from the sun. Last night it rained and I begged her to come inside. She shook her head slowly, as if doing so caused her pain. I took out an umbrella and held it over her, but she growled so deeply and inhumanely that I dropped it and fled inside.

In the morning, Travis comes around and I make him coffee. We sit down next to her, hoping the aroma will tempt her.

It doesn’t.

‘She’s given up,’ Travis says.

‘That’s not what this is,’ I say. P1.

So begins Rhett Davis’ new book, Arborescence. In the novel, Davis puts forward the idea of humans choosing to stand still so they can turn into trees. The term he uses to describe this phenomenon is aborescence. An unsettling and somewhat mind-bending idea, one which in these times of climate crisis and out of control capitalism, conjures up a multitude of reasons why it doesn’t seem like a bad idea. As a character in the book who chooses the path to aborescent explains,

‘ There’s so much that’s wrong … Imagine how much good I can do. I can help the earth heal. I can be part of the solution, not the problem.’ p237

While none of the artists in this exhibition is attempting to turn into a tree (Not that we are aware of anyway). Plant Life brings together a group of artists who for a range of different reasons; beauty, sentimentality, cultural, memorial, ecological, ethical, deeply personal, and/or political – use plants as either subject matter, content, or medium in their artwork.

With more than 400000 land based species of plants, as subject matter alone this provides a dazzling array for artists to draw on for inspiration. Plants provide astonishing beauty as well as the basis of life on this planet.

The relationship between plants and the animal kingdom is necessary and complex.

For centuries and across various cultures, the vegetal world has been fertile ground for artists. Contemporary artists are increasingly engaging with plants as subject matter and medium, reflecting a growing interest in nature, the environment, and the intersections between art, culture, and science. Artists are using plants in diverse ways to explore themes of environmentalism, cultural identity, and the human relationship with the natural world. 

By the time we get near the end of Davis’ book, about one third of the human population have consciously decided to turn into trees, disrupting the world as we know it.

As we grapple with the urgency of climate change during the Anthropocene era, reconsidering human/plant relationships becomes essential if we are to develop a sustainable future for the planet. Artists along with researchers and activists play a critical role in shifting our current anthropocentric ways of thinking, being and living, to one which encourages us to reflect on our relationship nature and bring the vegetal world into our consciousness in more caring, connected and sharing ways.

David Ray, Asian Style with a Western Rhyme

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery two
29 November 2025 / 11 January 2026

DAVID RAY
Asian Style with a Western Rhyme

In March 2025, I journeyed to Jingdezhen, China.  Often called the “Porcelain Capital of the world” Jingdezhen is renowned for its ancient porcelain production that stretches back more than 1,700 years. I arrived carrying questions, yet the place welcomed me with an uncanny sense of familiarity. It didn’t feel like a destination; it felt like returning home to something I had always known but never named. Within the ancient city, the clay carries the memory of countless hands.

One evening, thanks to our group leader Janet DeBoos, I shared my work with a porcelain factory owner. He regarded it with long, thoughtful stillness before saying:

*“Your work has an Asian style with a Western rhyme.”

Those words felt like a quiet revelation—naming the in-between place where my practice truly lives: between cultures, between inheritances, in the soft spiritual space where traditions meet without needing translation.

The feeling of home pulled me back again in November. I returned to Jingdezhen for three weeks, allowing the city to unfold in its gentle, familiar way. I walked its streets as if retracing steps from another life, meeting makers who shared their craft with a sense of lineage that felt both ancient and welcoming. The connections formed were not brief encounters—they felt like reconnections, as if I had stepped back into a story I had momentarily stepped away from.

This exhibition is my offering to that lineage and to the sense of belonging it stirred.

The Chinese ceramic forms that guide me—the bowl that holds silence, the vessel that stands like a guardian, the jar that cradles breath—carry an old intelligence of form and presence. They are more than vessels; they feel like spiritual thresholds. When I make, I stand at that threshold, listening for what wants to be shaped.

My own pieces rise from this conversation across cultures and time. Blue and white surfaces echo my Western heritage; decals and sculptural marks drift across them like symbols or fragments from a dream. The work becomes a place where influences merge—quietly, naturally—like two currents meeting under the surface of still water.

Each vessel stands on reclaimed timber from my back fence—material once meant to divide, now transformed into a platform of elevation. It feels like a small ritual act: turning a boundary into a bridge, lifting the work beyond utility and allowing it to be experienced as presence, as story, as spirit.

The imagery living on the vessels—a woman in song, a tipsy monkey, a tattooed panda, a tiger dressed in calm authority—functions like a series of gentle guides. They’re playful, yet symbolic, inviting viewers to enter the work intuitively, to find their own meanings, to let the pieces speak in the quiet language of imagination. The vessels become companions in this process—more than objects, they’re holders of mystery, waiting for the stories the viewer brings.

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Rachael Rose, Objects of Ornament and Utility

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, ceramic space

29 November 2025 / 11 January 2026

RACHAEL ROSE

Objects of Ornament and Utility

Lace handkerchief, 2025, stoneware, galze, underglaze, 25 x 25 x 5 cm approx

Objects of Ornament and Utility investagates the meeting point of beauty and function, referencing the Arts and craft movements and the ideas of William Morris, who believed object should be both purposeful and thoughtfully made. The exhibition also considers the home as a psychological landscape - a place where the complexities of the self are lived, stored and projected onto things we keep close.

At its centre is Surface Tension, a three-dimensional wallpaper installation in which mounted vessels and suspended handkerchiefs invoke the legacy of William Morris. This gesture situates the work within a decorative arts lineage while simultaneously unsettling its conventions. In dialogue with this installation are lace edged handkerchiefs and over sized chains, a suite of vessels distinguished by exaggerated handles articulates weight, utility, and domestic familiarity, yet deliberately exceeds functional expectation to assert sculptural presence. Together, these works sustain an inquiry into the relationship between form and function, holding the two in deliberate suspension and inviting reflection on how material objects oscillate between the utilitarian and the aesthetic.

Much of this thinking emerges from the role of the home as the nerve centre of the self. It is within domestic space that emotions are felt most fully. Grief, joy, frustration, comfort - each absorbed into the textures of everyday objects. The things we surround ourselves with become extensions of identity: chosen, arranged, collected, and charged with personal meaning. Each object becomes a small externalisation of the internal world.

This approach resonates with Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, particularly his phenomenological account of intimate spaces - rooms, corners, and the smallest domestic details, as sites of emotional weight that shape inner life. The works presented here extend that lineage, offering a meditation on how ornament, utility, and the objects of the home disclose the complex interiors of human experience.

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Brodie Ellis, Visitations

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery one
27 September / 02 November 2025

BRODIE ELLIS
Visitations

Comet G3 ATLAS (small), 2025, oil on linen, framed, 32 x 26 cm

Brodie Ellis's Visitations exhibition brings together painting and ceramic sculpture to explore the rare and spectacular appearances of four comets—Leonard, Atlas, ISON, and McNaught—whose journeys across our skies are shaped by cycles of deep time. The project draws inspiration from Max Ernst’s painting Humboldt Current (1951–52), adopting his method of layering paint over textured surfaces to evoke the turbulence and energy of both oceanic and cosmic flows. 

For Ellis, the orbits of these comets are vast arcs, carrying primordial material from its earliest epochs. Each return is a rare encounter, a momentary crossing of cosmic and earthly experience that connects us to the solar system’s ancient past and uncertain future. In Visitations, the comet paintings employ subtly textured surfaces to capture the sense of movement, dissolution, and renewal that defines each comet’s passage. 

Alongside these works, experimental white raku ceramic forms evoke the fragmentation, luminosity, and interconnectedness of cometary bodies and cosmic cycles. The raku process’s unpredictability mirrors the dynamic, often violent evolution of comets as they near the Sun. These ceramic forms reference both the dispersal of cometary dust and the invisible forces that bind cosmic and terrestrial systems.

Visitations invites viewers to contemplate the parallels between oceanic upwellings and cometary passages—each a visitation that disrupts, enriches, and transforms its environment. The exhibition shows us examples of encounters that bridge the cosmic and the earthly, and celebrates the deep timescales that shape the rhythms of our universe.

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Emma Jimson, Wedge

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, ceramic space
27 September / 02 November 2025

EMMA JIMSON
Wedge

Wham, cup, 2025, porcelain, glaze 9.2 x 6.6 x 9.8 cm

WEDGE explores the push and pull of closeness and separation through both form and function. As a shape, a wedge is deliciously simple yet it evokes complex dynamics with its inherent capacity to connect, support or divide.

According to Dunbar’s number, there are limits to the number of meaningful relationships we can successfully maintain. These boundaries sits beneath the presented pieces where small interactions become markers of human togetherness and tension.

With a craft practice focused on the process of mould-making and slip-casting, Emma works with plaster, porcelain and glaze to design and create objects to both hold and be held.

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Lara Chamas, Who eats his fill while his neighbour is hungry

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery two
27 September / 02 November 2025

LARA CHAMAS
Who eats his fill while his neighbour is hungry

Lara Chamas is a Lebanese artist, based in Naarm (Melbourne). Fleeing from war, her parents migrated to Australia, where she was born. Her practice investigates topics of postcolonial and migrant narratives within the context of her cultural identity. Using narrative and experience documentation, storytelling, transgenerational trauma and memory and tacit knowledge; her research explores links and meeting points between narrative theory, cultural practice, current political and societal tensions, and the body as a political vessel. Central to her practice is the expansion of these notions in a more historical and anthropological sense. With discussing geopolitical issues, research and first-hand experience is important to the authenticity of her work.

Chamas’ work has been exhibited widely including at Campbelltown Arts Centre, Gertrude Contemporary, Warrnambool Art Gallery, KINGS Artist Run, Bus Projects, West Space, The Substation, Incinerator Gallery, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery and Griffith Regional Gallery as part of the National Emerging Art Glass Prize, as well as in Ramallah, Palestine, during a residency. Chamas is a regular contributor to arts discourse via mentoring, teaching, panel discussions, artist talks, and written text. Chamas has 8 years of community theatre experience, before working as crew on the premiere season of THEM at La Mama Theatre. 

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Honor Freeman, Familiar & Strange

Magali Gentric ·

stockroom Kyneton, gallery two
16 August / 21 September 2025

HONOR FREEMAN
Familiar & Strange

Clay is a material that embodies both control and chaos.

Ideas of containment occupy the making and embrace clay's capricious nature in this suite of work. Familiar & Strange plays with ruptures, leaks, and growths, highlighting the tensions between material dualities: soft/hard, beautiful/ugly, fragile/durable, liquid/solid.

Ordinary and seemingly insignificant items intimately connected with the body—chewing gum, soap, towels, hot water bottles—are cast in porcelain and transformed, becoming strange souvenirs and nostalgic relics from the domestic landscape. These ubiquitous objects, caught

between discarded beauty and unsettling decay, reflect their leaking and rupturing states.

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Paul White, Shades and fades

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery one
16 August / 21 September 2025

PAUL WHITE
Shades and fades

Over time, memories of and from

moments I’ve been and things I’ve seen

digital instants, made analogue and slow

the works and the play, make sense of a place within

fantastical colours fade to soft, sometimes too hard

machines that move us, like us can stop

things that grow overcome and flourish

also perish and devour 

the earth erodes, we add to it

we take from it, we make from it

the brutal the beautiful

all is magical is all

…

Paul White is intrigued by obsolescence, the passage of time, and the notions of transformation associated with it. He is interested in how memory, place, and time shape us, and in examining particular yet often random moments from his personal history and movements to map out a navigation and exploration of the world. Working from photographs White has captured, these images represent fleeting moments, but become thoroughly investigated through his process of working with pencil on paper. This is not only an attempt to gather every degree of information from the image or moment, but also a way of slowing down the world through the process of creation.

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Paul White's art practice explores the everyday through pencil work on paper. He has an MFA (Art) from California Institute of the Arts and is a Samstag International Visual Arts Scholar. He has been awarded the Pollock-Krasner Grant, Metro Art Award, John Villiers Outback Art Prize, Omnia Art Award Works on Paper and is a two-time winner of the Muswellbrook Art Prize works on paper. He has been a multiple-time finalist in awards such as the Dobell Drawing Prize, National Works On Paper, Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing, Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award, Paul Guest Prize, Rick Amor Drawing Prize and Fishers Ghost prize. He has works in the collections of Artbank, Rockhampton Museum of Art, Newcastle Art Gallery, Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre, Campbelltown Arts Centre, the Kedumba Collection and private collections.

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Jade Power, Quiet Exchanges

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, ceramic space
16 August / 21 September 2025

JADE POWER
Quiet Exchanges

Jade Power’s practice is grounded in a deep engagement with material, and the quiet yet rigorous labour of making. Working primarily with porcelain, she approaches creative practice as a space where control yields to collaboration.

Through slow, repetitive gestures, she builds an embodied relationship with materials. The work often begins with precise, intentional forms, which are then subjected to processes that invite transformation, risk and unpredictability. Gravity, heat, and the agency of the kiln act as co-creators - warping, collapsing and reshaping the work beyond the artist’s hand. Surrender to the unknown is central to her process. Rather than pursuing perfection or predetermined outcomes, Power welcomes uncertainty as a site of possibility - where form, meaning, and knowledge emerge through chance, disruption, and collaboration. The completed works become a dialogue between meticulous labor, repetition and control; balanced with the spontaneity and volatility of ceramic processes.

Power explores how precarity and paradox can be held within a material practice. Her work negotiates the space between structure and collapse, control and surrender and resists the drive toward fixed outcomes or resolved forms. Rather than seeking resolution, her practice dwells in these tensions, treating contradiction not as a problem to solve, but a space to inhabit. 

An ongoing negotiation with self, material, and the world, her creative practice is a space to unlearn control and stay with uncertainty. Power’s work invites slowness, reflection, and presence. This way of working becomes a metaphor for how we might move through the world. Her practice is about staying with the trouble - offering a quiet reflection on the complexity of the human experience.

Jade Power completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramics at RMIT in 2024 and is currently undertaking her Honours degree. Her graduate work recognised with several awards, including the Fiona & Sidney Myer Ceramic Art Award, the Ceramics and Glass Circle of Australia Award, and the Stockroom Kyneton Exhibition Award—offering her the exciting opportunity to exhibit with Stockroom. Power’s graduate work is also currently featured in Hatched: National Graduate Exhibition at PICA.

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