Mending a kitchen table

Camilla Pontigga presents her first solo exhibition

"Mending a kitchen table"

Join us for an artist walk about and a series of performances.

This exhibition comes from almost a year of artistic research and a 3 month residency at August House where Camilla has focused on unravelling what she describes as a ‘colonial blueprint’. This new body of work is the result of where she sees the unravelling has since taken her. What came out of that process was a journey back into deeply embodied modes of knowing, being, and doing, attuning to what Sylvia Wynter describes as ‘autopoietic being’. Autopoietic refers to a system that creates and maintains itself, distinguishing it from the non-living world through its self-producing and self-sustaining processes..

Where her previous work wrestled with a colonial blueprint and how to unravel or renegotiate her orientation to it, her new work seeks to attune to the rhythms of ‘aesthesis’ and ‘decolonial aesthesis’, whilst unravelling the Western canon of art and aesthetics present in her life and education. Using her kitchen table - a place for of communion and love for the artist and one of her earliest sensory and creative connections to aesthesis, she has begun to create work that, in one way or another, connects to the labour of preparing food for others. Taking tablecloths that are dyed with food and mended; preparing and sharing beloved recipes such as 'tè al limone' and 'magwinya'; creating paintings with bread dough; baking picture frames out of bread; all of these works are acts of mending and of care. These are attempts towards a reparative act. Camilla does not think that one can ‘fix’ what was previously broken, cast aside, or othered. She does not think of repair as an action that can return something to its former, unbroken state. Rather she thinks of ‘repair’ as an act of mending, one that evidences the mending done, and in so doing, holds what was and builds on it something that can begin to breathe again.

The performances are limited to 5 people and need to be booked for.

The walk about will take place for approximately an hour at 12:00.

The exhibition will open to the public during both the walk about and the performance pieces.