Orbits is a group exhibition featuring Emmeline Joy Morris, Dan Mitchell, Daniel Octoriver and Mim Libro. The show takes cues from Frank Frazetta, HR Giger, and the counter culture surrealism of Alexandro Jodorowsky. Dan Mitchell's paintings establish the backdrop. Mim Libro's airbrushed characters supply the cast. Emmeline Joy Morris's ceramic armour provides protection. Daniel Octoriver's graphic compositions offer a kind of map for navigating the exhibition and its imagined territories.
Emmeline Joy Morris works primarily in ceramics, extending into video, fashion and sound. Based in Sydney, with previous residencies in Germany and the UK, her anthropomorphic forms sit between flesh and object. Drawing on fantasy weaponry and armour, she replicates everyday objects in clay as stand ins for the body. This practice comes from neurodivergent experiences of dissociation and overstimulation. These ceramic pieces are vulnerable but enduring. For Orbits, her work functions as the equipment needed to move through the dream world: armour, protection, extensions of the self.
Dan Mitchell paints overgrown, swampy interiors. Dense vegetation. Thick air. The light in his work builds its own weather, wet and glowing. These are not landscapes as background. They pull you to the water's edge to see what stirs below. Mitchell creates the climate of this seasonal world. His canvases are the ground everything else sits upon.
Daniel Octoriver is a tattooist, artist and Arakan martial art instructor working out of Richmond, Melbourne. His paintings mix manga illustration, spiky typography and biomechanical tattoo compositions. He charts relationships between line and flesh, image and sensation. His works act as maps or game plans. They give you the visual language to find your way through the exhibition.
Mim Libro uses airbrush to make hyper comic witch characters. They are always up to something. Her work starts at home: mice in the walls, sleepless nights, catching something frightened by hand. From there she moves to bigger concerns. Fragility. Gentleness. Guilt. The imbalance between power and survival. Knives find backs. Skulls carry sadness. The yin yang gets clutched. Her figures are wounded but still reaching. They are the cast of Orbits, moving through Mitchell's swamps, protected Morris's talismans, following Octoriver's parchment.