To enter Penrith Regional Gallery, you must pass through one of a few gates. It’s likely a small, waist-height gate with little or no decorative embellishment. It’s also probably a gate that Margo and Gerald Lewers, or their family and friends, passed through long before this was a gallery, when it was their home and garden. When this space became a regional gallery in 1981, many of the original functions of this space changed, but the original gates remain. Here, audiences are invited to pass through The Gate and experience the installation much like a garden. An atmosphere of impressions and association, where traces of the human hand mark the material surface and show signs of former lives, both human and botanical.
Jana Hawkins-Andersen and Paris Taia are Sydney-based artists who were invited to engage with the Penrith Regional Gallery collection. The Gate is an installation comprising ceramics, plants and a selection of botanical drawings from our archives, created by Adolph Plate, Margo Lewers’ grandfather, during his extensive travels in Polynesia and Melanesia.
As collaborators, Jana and Paris draw on their disciplines of ceramics and horticulture to create a holistic environment that embraces the porose, and blurs distinctions of interior and exterior, the living and the dormant, the ornate and the functional, as well as the beginning and the endpoint of given histories.
The life of any given thing – a painting, a piece of furniture, a plant – experiences a kind of inertia once it enters a collection. But things change, things grow. They can be unwieldly to contain, and unwilling to remain as they were. The Gate is a proposition for audiences, to think back on the moments that precipitated what we now call the legacy and estate of the Lewers – Penrith Regional Gallery. Open the gate. Stay for a while.
Jana Hawkins-Andersen creates installations combining found objects, organic matter and discarded textiles with ceramic based sculptures and assemblages. Her practice is materially driven and uses ideas of care, interdependency and craft to critique patriarchal narratives of history.
Paris Taia is a horticulturalist and artist whose use of plants responds to stories of seed migration, cultural usage and an understanding of the environmental conditions needed for species to thrive. Her material garden practice is informed by horticultural investigations and Pacific Islands flora and building materials which act as entry points for exploration into familiar histories.
