Cathe Stack, Portrait at MAG&M with Coastline Series A new exhibition by multidisciplinary artist and PhD student Cathe Stack will open on 21 April at Manly Art Gallery & Museum (MAG&M), offering visitors a deep dive into sacred country and local landscape.
Stack’s new work Connectivity: Country/Landscape is an installation that reflects the elemental landscape of Sydney’s Middle Harbour.
Working with two-and-three-dimensional forms, Stack uses moulded timber and photographic applications, drawing and ceramics, to stimulate the viewer into quiet contemplation.
Part of a trio of thought-provoking shows to open at MAG&M during Autumn, alongside artists Kunmanara Carroll and Blak Douglas, Cathe Stack’s work delves into themes of ecological deep time and language, while also exploring the transformative power of engagement with landscape.
Interim CEO Louise Kerr said Cathe Stack continues to make valuable contributions to the arts and the local community, previously having shown at MAG&M in the 2019/20 Manly Dam Project, which saw artists collaborate with engineers to create new work in response to place, history, water management, and engineering.
“Cathe Stack is an artist who connects deeply with the landscape. Through her PhD at the University of New South Wales, Cathe is deeply involved with thinking about the natural environment, and she is someone skilled at offering ideas around our learned connectivity to shared landscape.
“We’re excited to have Cathe back in the gallery once again to engage audiences with questions about our local history and the future of our natural environment.
“Like many of our local artists, Cathe is deeply immersed in the local terrain and geography of the Northern Beaches, bringing work to the surface that is subtle, powerful and contemplative,” Ms Kerr said.
Time: Open 10am-5pm, Tue-Sun. Closed Mondays and Public Holidays
Place: MAG&M, 1a West Esplanade, Manly
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Cathe Stack Special Events
Middle Harbour Walk
Sat 22 April, 9am – 12pm
Join artist Cathe Stack and landscape architect and academic Joshua Zeunert on a guided bush walk to learn more about the unique landscape, topography, and ecosystem of Middle Harbour through shared stories. Book
Panel discussion – Landscape and artefact Wed 3 May, 6 – 7.30pm Artist Cathe Stack is joined by spatial artist and academic, Dr Ainslie Murray, to unpack the ways connectivity to shared landscape is shaped by differing knowledge-based systems. Register
About the artist:
Cathe Stack’s multi-disciplinary art practice encompasses the three-dimensional exploration of form to navigate connections between our shared landscapes.
Her practice draws on empirical and tacit knowledge to explore the principle that understanding the structures and forces that shape landscape, fosters the means to create artefact. Referencing universal themes of belonging, attachment and responsibility, Stack examines what is absent, overlooked and hidden when differing knowledge systems inhabit shared landscape.
Stack’s work often references Sydney Harbour, the landscape she was born into, as she balances connective sensate physicality’ through participation in the natural world with an awareness that the landscape is shaped as much by complex, sometimes competing, histories, as it is by ‘deep time’ evolutionary processes that continue to unfold in the present day.
Diverse sculptural materials such as timber, ceramic, metal and fibre are supported with drawing, photography and the written word as investigative pathways in her three dimensional work.
In 2019 she was awarded a full-time scholarship to undertake a PhD at the University of New South Wales, Faculty of the Built Environment in the joint departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture.
