Alicia Cox, Christopher Whitfeld, Sophie Kihara-Murer

EASS 2024, Recast

5th - 29th March

Homestead Gallery 1 and 2

Recast brings together the works of three emerging Canberra based artists selected from graduates of ANU School of Art & Design, Alicia Cox, Sophie Kihara-Murer and Christopher Whitfield. Each reimagining materials, histories and identities through their distinctive practices. Running through these works is a sense of domesticity and work with each artist examining the tensions and intimate details of everyday actions, images and materials. Whether through the transformation of household objects, the repurposing of industrial textiles, or the imprinting of natural and built environments. Alicia Cox casts the human form into functional objects, questioning gender roles and domesticity. Sophie Kihara-Murer weaves narratives of labour, race, and environmental exploitation into intricate textile compositions. Christopher Whitfeld imprints landscapes onto clay, fossilizing moments of nature and human influence into tactile images. In Recast, labour becomes both a method and a subject, revealing the unseen narratives embedded in the materials that shape our lives.

Artist statements

Alicia Cox

Alicia Cox creates tableware and tablescapes using casts of her body to examine gender roles, function, and the female body as a vessel. Her reimagined vessels highlight how domestic objects extend the body, shaping social performance and enculturating everyday roles.

Christopher Whitfeld

Christopher Whitfeld’s earth-works series merges photography and ceramics to explore new ways of making images. Using photos taken on the South Coast of New South Wales, he creates resin-printed stamps of indigenous flora, fauna, and architectural elements, imprinting them into clay. Through repetition and deconstruction, these impressions become abstracted from their original contexts. The unglazed surfaces reveal the raw texture of the material, capturing cracks and fissures that emerge through process-based inquiry. Whitfeld’s work recontextualizes landscape, fossilizing fragments of nature and human influence into a single tactile image, reflecting his view of human activity as an extension of the natural world.

Sophie Kihara-Murer

Sophie Kihara-Murer explores the intersections of exploitation, race, environment, and gender through tapestry compositions. By recontextualizing the histories embedded in onion bags—materials tied to manual labor, disposability, and marginalized communities—she invites viewers to consider the complex narratives they carry. Through tapestry and embroidery, Kihara-Murer transforms these textiles into intricate visual compositions that merge craft and painting. Drawn to their grid-like patterns, she uses them as a foundation to explore texture, form, color, and their past commercial identities. Her process is rooted in experimenting with material utilities, lineages, and politics to create layered, thought-provoking works.