Keep in Touch is a creative project exploring loneliness through craft art, visible mending workshops, and a dinner party.
Loneliness at its core stems from a lack of meaningful communication and connection with others. If you’ve ever felt lonely in a room full of people, you know connection isn’t created from quantity of social interaction – it comes from the depth of those interactions, when you truly feel seen.
Five emerging Melbourne artists have been commissioned to create artworks that engage with the concept of loneliness – portraying the sensation and struggle, or celebrating the deep connections that heal it. Audiences are invited to reflect on their own relationships to connection and solitude, and explore how loneliness is felt, understood, and healed.
The activities connected to the project were developed to break down modern barriers to connection. Whether that’s meeting in person, or learning a helpful skill, Keep in Touch is a reminder that connection, like craft, is something we make by hand.
Please join us for an Exhibition Opening Celebration:
Wednesday, 24th September, 6pm – 8pm
Gasworks Arts Park
21 Graham Street
Albert Park VIC 3206
Social Dinner:
Making friends as an adult is hard – meet new people and make new connections over food and art! We’ll be serving three courses in the gallery and enjoying an accessible art activity to get the conversations going! Let us know your dietary needs when you fill out the form.
Thursday 25/09, 6pm – 8pm
Free Visible Mending Workshop:
Learning to mend clothes and textiles has personal, environmental, financial, and creative benefits! Louise Samuelsson will be running a fun, entry-level workshop teaching simple hand-embroidery and visible darning. Bring a piece of clothing that you would like to mend, or just come and learn. All materials provided.
Wednesday 15/10, 6pm – 8pm
Saturday 18/10, 2pm – 4pm
Participating Artists:
Louise Samuelsson is a Swedish textile artist living and working in Naarm/Melbourne since 2018. Poetics, the visceral, and the corporeal are at the forefront of her work. Using needle and thread to puncture and move beyond the surface, her practice manifests healing and hurting working in discordant tandem. The fabrics implemented throughout her work are often donated by friends and strangers, imbuing them with countless personal stories that speak to the interconnectedness of people.
Sam Kariotis is a multidisciplinary artist combinding mediums of collage with projection, installation, sculpture and sound work. His work reimagines both classical and mundane imagery exploring themes of magic, sexuality, and the unconcious. Through his core practice he aims to bring intuitive processes into collage and installation. Creating intimate encounters with the trans masculine body, he summons viewers to witness a nuanced and highly personal depiction of this lived experience.
Alana Davis is a Melbourne-based artist whose work explores themes drawn from her lived experience and personal perspective. Working predominantly through craft mediums, she engages with the intimate and the everyday, using materiality as a means of reflection and connection.
Jorja Timms
Anselma Forlano
Keep in Touch is proudly supported by the City of Port Phillip Cultural Development Fund.
For more information click here
