Kerrie Poliness

Landscape paintings with the beach at Lorne 2025

acrylic, acrylic paint

Beach drawing 2025

collaborative public drawing

Poliness’ ‘landscape paintings’ invert the traditional genre depicting a scene objectively, instead situating numerous diamond shaped paintings on clear acrylic within the landscape itself. They are temporary exhibitions, conditioned by the shifting site conditions such as tidal movements, daylight, wind and rain. The specific colour of each painting is derived from flora and fauna found on site—shells, seaweed, and feathers. The diamond shape is anthropomorphic and embodies the principle of diagonality. It is a recurrent motif in Poliness’ art, signifying the interconnectedness of interdependencies between people and place, nature and art.

The landscape paintings made during the research period will be installed as ‘exhibitions’ and documented using video. Poliness will make a film relating to this work that will be screened during the Biennale as part of the Tidal Movements series. For the Biennale’s Sculpture+ program, the artist will host a large participatory ‘tidal drawing’, made directly onto the beach using simple tools like sticks for drawing lines and gardening trowels. The drawings will change and eventually vanish with the incoming tide. The format of the drawings and the timing of these events will be informed by local knowledge through on-site research of the tides in relation to local tidal charts.

Kerrie Poliness is based in Naarm/Melbourne and is associated with an influential group of artists working with geometric abstraction in Melbourne in the late 1980s and 90s, through the innovative artist-run space Store 5 which she co-founded. She is known for her painting and drawing works that revisit the ideas and practices of conceptual art, using everyday materials to produce large scale asymmetrical geometric artworks which respond to the place in which they are made. Since the early 1990s Poliness has designed systems for making art. Patterns are drawn onto various surfaces via instruction manuals, which enable other people to participate in the process of making her artworks. The drawings and the process of making them reveals something intrinsic about matter, that nothing is physically perfect or symmetrical even if it looks like it is. These artworks highlight interconnective processes and patterns of nature and people, and often involve workshops and collective activity.

Poliness’s significant exhibition history includes Field Drawing #1, HOTA, Gold Coast (2018); Every Brilliant Eye: Australian Art of the 1990s, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2017); Landscape Paintings (Lake Bolac and Zagreb) and Wave Drawings (orange and green), G-MK, Zagreb (2014); Trace: Performance and its Documents, Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2014); Wall works, Arts Lifts, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2014); and Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2013). Poliness has developed a number of site-specific public artworks including Stream, Green Square, Zetland, Sydney (2022); Parliament Steps Walking Drawing, Melbourne (2021); Field Drawing #1, Maywar Green, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2014); and Wave Drawings, Highpoint Shopping Centre, Melbourne (2013). Her work is in public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Museum of Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Heide Museum of Modern Art, and Dowse Museum, Lower Hutt, as well as prominent private and corporate collections.