Current
Work

GHOST STATES: Karen Mills and Sarah Pirrie
Cross Art Projects
Opening Saturday 13 September, 2 pm
Opening talk by artists Karen Mills and Sarah Pirrie with guest speaker Dr Wendy Garden (Head of Audience, Education & Learning, Museum and Art Gallery Northern Territory)

Exhibition runs 13 September to 11 October 2025In Ghost States, artists Karen Mills and Sarah Pirrie visualise the ebb and flow of their two-decades long conversation on the fleeting traces or ghost movements of objects in landscapes and composition. The artists have sketched together and worked on projects with specialists and colleagues on intercultural collaborations often in response to rare and endangered environments. The idea of a trace or ghost suggests the term “punctum” used by Roland Barthes to describe an incidental but personally poignant detail in a photograph which pierces or prompts a meaning particular to a viewer.

Gallery view

Detail view
Line of Defence, 2025. This two-sided artwork reads through mangrove geli prints and wrack illustrations of found relational materials from Darwin Harbour

Making mangrove wrack print for Line of Defence
Some of the mangrove wrack, including Pneumatophore cable roots

SCROLLING- work in process

reading wrackly
with Tidal Shifts 2021
Something is missing and in doing so something is revealed.

Watching Tidal Shifts, we can see the ever-present wave force, moving in and out of the silk scrolls’ frame with each multitasking wave, objects are shifted into flickering beings, are “carried” within, are shaped and reshaped and are temporarily aligned.

Tidal Shifts materially engages with a 2000-year-old Chinese tradition of Gongbi style realist painting and the projected filmic imagery of wave action and sea foam. Cinematic realism is the interlocutor of painting. The entanglement of these modes through representation, editing and projection recognises acts of filtering or veiling for the effect of both concealment and revelation.

Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway in their 2013 book Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human articulate film’s relationship to its own ecological materiality including “its locations, onscreen lives, mise-en-scene, narrative, structures, spectators, exhibition spaces, its carbon footprint and chemical building blocks, from celluloid to silicon”. This idea is developed comprehensively by Nadia Bozak in her 2012 book, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources.

In Tidal Shifts digital projection and silk scroll combine in their imprint on the world through countless extraction. From the manufacturing of silk, import and export process of ocean roads to the animal by-product stearic acid in the plastic parts of computers which aid the making and projection process. All this hidden doing, this biophysical footprint is cut together-apart within Tidal Shifts’ pictorial rendering and through selective anthropogenic material collecting from East Point Reserve beach. Items collected are both recognisable and fragmented plastics and metals. Each found their own way to the wrack, via monsoonal runoff, through accidental or intended discard and through coastal currents and tidal flows. Collected from the wrackline the biophysical presence of this matter becomes painting within the narrative fragment of a continuous scroll and filmic wave.

In the manner of Gongbi tradition, underpainted forms in white, water-based paint have been rendered on the back of the ‘cinematic capture net’ that is the silk scroll. The process of tuō sè or back painting is usually done to reveal the meticulous painting of realistic natural on the front of the silk. In Tidal Shifts without the contextual painted front, tuō sè presents a speculative lessness of form. Something is missing and in doing so something is revealed. This is only reinforced by the revelation, concealment and rendering of the tide itself. This artwork is the proposed beginning of a new silk road series which will address in-between spaces of painting and cinema, coastal wrack exchange and trade. In this series histories and futurities that reflect on contexts and worlds to make explicit efforts of mutual attention and activities of endurance.

Tidal Pull

2020

Post Production 19 Dec 2020

Matthew van Roden and Sarah Pirre

Artwork produced during micro residency at PirrieSpace

Similitude 06112020
Medium: polystyrene wrack, chroma key green paint

Nov 2020

Similitude considers the constant accumulation of polystyrene wrack on our coastal beaches in a disconcerting quest for dematerialisation. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) defines dematerialisation as the reduction of total material and energy throughput of any product and service, and thus the limitation of its environmental impact.
Over time polystyrene amalgamates with coral, sponges, and mangrove propagules to form tidal arrangements that confuse characteristic distinctions between organic and manufactured. The wrackline exposes visual similitudes as shipping and manufacturing products are reduced to flotsam and jetsam. Sun bleached, microbially decomposed and tidally abrased, both coral and polystyrene lie together on the shore in their various states of post- production composting.
Chroma key green is a post-production visual effect of compositing. In the filmic world keying green allows the dissolution of figure and ground combining visual elements from separate sources into a single image. Similitude sublimates the polystyrene and coral in an anti-visual materialisation display, to pose the question: Which one will disappear first?

Similitude 06112020

Similitude 06112020

Similitude 06112020

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