Tensile Connections
- Niloufar Lovegrove
- Mar 22
- 4 min read
onespace
Tensile Connections
7 March- 5 April 2025
Sally Molloy
Maker, mother, writer, teacher, gardener, lover on unceded Jagera and Turrbal lands (Brisbane/Meanjin).
Tensile Connections brings together new and existing works by Sonja Carmichael, Elisa Jane Carmichael, Niloufar Lovegrove (Pishva), and Elysha Rei: four artists working with paper to reimagine material culture and retrieve ancestral stories. The word ‘tensile’—relating to tension but also to the ability to be stretched—is apt in describing the practices of these four women, who each capture longing, struggle, loss, and resistance in their delicate objects and images, but also a profound sense of flexibility, resilience, and transculturation.
This spirit of adaptability and transformation is palpable in a collection titled Spirit Reeds by mother and daughter duo Sonja and Elisa Jane Carmichael, Ngugi women from Quandamooka, Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), and Mulgumpin (Moreton Island).
Central to this series of prints, produced during a 2024 residency with Magandjin/ Brisbane-based master printmaker David Jones, is a new material exploration of ungaire reeds, often used by the artists for weaving vessels, mats, adornments, and other objects. Here, the ungaire reeds have been rolled through a large press, leaving behind a trace of their material existence. The presence of absence is felt strongly in these delicate reliefs that seem to teeter on the brink between the pictorial and the sculptural. The ghostly presence of the ungaire reeds pressed into the paper might suggest ‘missing pieces’ or losses associated with ongoing colonial processes, such as occupation, assimilation, dispossession, and epistemic violence. Simultaneously, like a shell curling around its own central cavity, the craters established by the pressure applied to the reeds through the printing press could be seen as vessels or openings: spaces carved out for new ways of weaving connections between the past and the present on Country.
In Niloufar Lovegrove’s (Pishva) Equable Goddess (2022), the figure of a Persian woman stands tall to the right-hand side of a large linocut printed across an expanse of fifty-four paper panels. Dressed in an embroidered gown, she is pouring a jug. Her long hair flows freely, extending out beyond her body, snaking up, across, and around the composition like a dark, fast-flowing river. Surrounding this river of tresses are repeated visual references to horses prancing, birds flying, people playing music and dancing; the river sustains them, they sustain one another, they live. For Lovegrove (Pishva), this painstakingly carved depiction of a humble and nurturing goddess aims to challenge traditional tales of vengeful gods unleashing natural disasters on people and lands below. The force of nature could be seen here not as a punishment or warning, but as a flood of nourishment and care that transcends the scale of the individual. Additionally, for audiences familiar with the 2022 murder of Iranian woman Mahsa Amini and subsequent protests targeting government violence against women, the goddess and her river of free-flowing hair might also be read as a symbol of freedom, strength, and unity.
Fragility and strength abound in Elysha Rei’s paper-cuts depicting species of animals and plants intimately connected to the artist’s Japanese cultural heritage and historical narratives relating to her family’s migration to Australia. Many of these works come from a larger project titled Yohaku no bi/The Beauty of Empty Space, a title that encapsulates the ambivalent emptiness characterising Rei’s work (and works by others in this exhibition). Rei’s delicate wall-mounted paper-cut trees—each a reference to a species of bonsai growing at the Brisbane Botanic Gardens, Mt Coot-tha—hang upside down from the holes they were cut from, the edges ruffled and curled like old peeling wallpaper. For the artist, the tree’s connection to its roots or origins works like a metaphor to suggest her family’s ongoing connection to Japan. The paper remnants or discards scattered below each wall-mounted tree suggest cultural remnants preserved through oral histories and the sharing of material culture. And the central void in each work offers a moment of visual silence within which to contemplate the impact of cultural loss and the pain of assimilation.
Overall, this exhibition presents a diverse collection of works by women artists retrieving, reviving, or reimagining their cultural heritage. Central to these explorations is paper, which, in its most basic sense, is thin, nonwoven material made from cellulose fibres bonded together through processes involving soaking, sieving, pressing, pounding, and drying. Just as a start, the presence of this materiality offers meaningful access points for thinking about ancient technologies, historical global trade centres, and the evolution of mechanical reproduction. But this exhibition’s focus on paper also points the way to histories of liberation and oppression. Because paper was used in the service of empire to record, document, and control Indigenous communities, as well as to spread propaganda and misinformation, paper is political. Consequently, it might be this shared approach to materiality that lends works in Tensile Connections a collective sense of powerful softness: a tactile strength registered in the artists’ use of paper toward cultural resurgence, but also resistance.
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