SUNDARI CARMODY
b. 1988, NSW
Lives and works in Adelaide
Born in Murwillumbah, NSW, in 1988, the artist was raised in Bali, an island renowned for its strong animist belief systems and cultural traditions. This experience is not visualised in her work but has an indirect presence.
Carmody’s practice is concerned with the cultural, physiological and psychological aspects of ‘the dark’: dark matter, dark energy, sleep, circadian rhythms, unknown territories of consciousness and the night, evoking intangible forces, thresholds and states of transition.
Using varied and carefully selected materials such as nocturnal scents, sleep-bringing poppies, fabric, brass, light and mist, she attempts to find useful frameworks to give form to things that are invisible, or which lie just beyond the limits of our perception.
Sundari Carmody was one of six artists in Primavera: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2022. She was a finalist in the 2023 Ramsay Art Prize at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Her work was included in Slow Moving Waters: 2021 TarraWarra Biennial at the TarraWarra Museum, Healesville.
In 2021, she was commissioned to create a public artwork for Lot Fourteen, Adelaide The work, a black steel tubular work with an LED component titled ‘One: all that we can see’, was unveiled in 2022. In 2020-21 Sundari Carmody was a resident artist at the ACE Gallery studios in Adelaide.
Sundari holds a BFA (Hons) from the University of South Australia. Her work has been exhibited across Australia and is held in private collections and Artbank.
Photo Credit: Saul Steed
TURNS, PROTRACTED, AND SLOW / NOVEMBER 1 - DECEMBER 1
GAGPROJECTS is pleased to present Turns, Protracted, and Slow, an exhibition of new work by Sundari Carmody. This is her first solo exhibition of sculptures at the gallery, featuring a constellation of objects made from various materials, including neon, silk, opium poppy seeds, and hand-printed photographs.
The title of the exhibition, Turns, Protracted, and Slow, is an indicator of her fascination with the intangible and the invisible, and the larger mechanisms of the cosmos. The essence of Carmody’s practice is charting the relationship between consciousness and the cosmos.
Neon light works are installed throughout the exhibition, ranging in form from minimal and linear to more gestural and intimate. These works give tangible expression to mostly fleeting or elusive perceptions of lightness, darkness, and the visible universe.
Carmody has been collecting sleep-bringing poppy seeds from her garden and suspends them in sheer silk organza pieces called Milky Way. Formally resembling lines of text on a page or black-and-white astronomical surveys.
Alongside these are hand-printed Gum Bichromate photographs that use the light of our nearest star, the Sun, to expose images of distant stars. The images fixed in the paper are historical astronomical surveys by significant astronomers William Herschel, Edwin Hubble and Vera Rubin.
There is considerable distance between the works in the exhibition, the emptiness in the gallery echoing thevast distances between astronomical objects and the spare quality of the work. In this exhibition, the artist invites the viewer to contemplate how our inner world, our consciousness, intersects with the outside world: water, birds, plants, and the sky.
