Staying With The Trouble - Exhibition

Staying With The Trouble, featuring Linda Dening, Kim Mahood, Sally Simpson and Wendy Teakel.

This drawing project began as an open-ended conversation between four artists, all of whom live on acreage on the outskirts of Canberra, using the environment as source material, and employing drawing as a primary catalyst for their individual art practices.

They chose Donna Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble as a source of common ground to underpin the project. Haraway advocates that the interconnected systems that form life don’t put humans at the centre. She challenges the reader to work within the current crisis of life in this damaged world and to understand that we are part of the system.

The artists met each month to discuss and critique each other’s work, and open themselves to professional critical conversations that would push them to extend their methods, concepts and materials - in other words, to get out of their comfort zones.

As the project evolved the artists all encountered the problems of pushing a work too far, losing it, staying with it, abandoning it and recovering it. Using drawing as a means of responding to and representing their world made it clear that drawing is its own process of 'staying with the trouble'.

Image: Kim Mahood, Tanami Burn, 2023, ink and pastel on paper, 76 x 224 cm.