PROJECT WITH SALLY CHESSEL

A MULTI-MEDIA INSTALLATION
Alpha Gallery, Sydney
Curated by Ira Ferris
Artist: Sally Chessell
August 2018

Sydney-based artist Sally Chessell works across photo-media and installation. For her first solo exhibition she brings together works that foreground the material and corporeal elements of an image as a way to explore grief, identity and mimesis. 

Simultaneously full of absence and presence, the works are poetic inquiries in which one thing folds into the other: a photograph becomes a body and the body a photograph. As she finds ways of locating herself within family, gendered and national histories, Chessell creates a texturally rich installation that is felt as much as seen. These are images in which figures hide in the folds of fabric and histories too large evade the frame. These are objects in which the materials speak back and bodies absent seem to find form.

Sally Chessell’s work was accompanied by a written poetic response of Eleanor Jackson whose work has been described as “powerful quiet” and featured in Overland Journal, Arc Poetry Magazine, Australian Poetry Journal, Bareknuckle Poet Annual Anthology, Going Down Swinging, Peril Magazine, Scum Magazine. 

Exhibition photos are here