Sculpture+

Throughout the Biennale a suite of free public programs, performances, and presentations titled Sculpture+ will establish a pivotal point of exchange and meaningful connection between artists, audiences, and communities. These events aim to encourage more ephemeral local encounters while providing opportunities for broad engagement. Biennale artists Lucy Allinson, Richard Collopy, DarkQuiet, Kerrie Poliness, and Jen Valender will host public programs or performances based on their existing installations. The following additional artists will also present works for this program.

All Sculpture+ events are free however booking is recommended as numbers are limited for some events.

This project was made possible by the Australian Government Regional Arts Fund, which supports the arts in regional and remote Australia, and Regional Arts Victoria.

Studio Forrest

Mother earth 2025

various found natural and synthetic materials

Mother earth is an installation of ten ephemeral works constructed from found natural and synthetic materials, which represent concepts of mother earth objects in the treed area. Drawing on the elements around them to establish a visceral connection to place, each artist evokes their conception of the ‘earth mother’—an eternally fruitful and powerful feminine source that generates and nurtures life—imploring us to connect and care for this place.

Studio Forrest will host weekly workshops at the artwork site on Wednesdays from 10am to 12pm.

For more information on these workshops and individual works download the brochure here

Jen Valender

HARP SCULPTURE PERFORMANCE
JEN VALENDER, GENEVIEVE FRY, EMILY KOSTOS
1 March, 2.30pm
Biennale site 1, meet at Lorne Beach carpark

BOOK HERE

Clearfell is an inter-elemental project with the wind assuming a performative role alongside a live performer. The artwork transforms an antique ABC TV satellite tripod into an Aeolian harp, a sculptural instrument activated by the wind. The materials used reflect the site’s layered history as a former clearfell logging tramway, referencing archival photographs. Valender will activate this work through an ethereal performance with two harpists, Genevieve Fry and Emily Kostos, in the context of the dramatic coastline of Point Grey.

Richard Collopy

ARTIST TALK & PERFORMANCE
2 March, 3pm
QDos Fine Arts, 35 Allenvale Road, Lorne VIC 3232

BOOK HERE

Richard Collopy is an artist and a proud member of the Gadubanud-Gulidjan Custodian/Traditional Owner community, which is a part of the larger Kirrae Whurrung and Gulidjan nations. His central installation on Lorne foreshore takes the form of a traditional wuurn structure, constructed from natural materials secured to a steel dome frame. As part of the Biennale’s Sculpture+ program, Collopy will host an artist talk and performance to explore the themes of his installation further, including family and community.

Creative Occupation

SHIPRITE, PERFORMANCE
8 March, 11am
Lorne groyne, meet at Cypress avenue entrance

BOOK HERE

Creative Occupation presents ephemeral performance rites in specific places, drawing from maritime themes and environmental investigations. Inverting the notion of dredging being a gesture of human extraction, removal and wreckage, Shiprite transforms the Lorne foreshore site with a one-off performance rite of renewal and accumulation. An assemblage of sculptural objects rests on a recycled sailcloth, and the performance centres on a walk pulling these items along the sand towards the Lorne groyne for temporary display.

Biennale Forum: Site, Art, Place

SITE, ART, PLACE: FORUM DISCUSSION

Saturday, 15 March, 2 - 3:30pm
Mantra Lorne, Observatory Room
Mountjoy Parade Lorne, VIC 3232
FREE - BOOK HERE

This conversation event hosted by STRATA curator Simon Lawrie will explore site-responsive curatorial and artistic practices with a local focus. Various approaches to site, place and public art will be discussed, including the practical, conceptual and experiential considerations of place-based contemporary art.Panellists include: Ilana Russell, independent curator, researcher and producer, and former Director, Platform ArtsProfessor David Cross, artist, writer and curator, Head of Art and Design Group, School of Communication and Creative Arts, Faculty of Arts & Education, Deakin University, and Co-Director of Public Art Commission.

Ilana Russell is a curator, researcher and producer, living and working on Wadawurrung Country in Geelong. Her practice is mostly discursive, establishing forms of exchange between people working at intersections of public space through the model of labs, residencies and shared learning situations. Ilana was the Artistic Director & Co-CEO of Platform Arts from 2019 - 2025, and is currently a PhD candidate with Monash University.
ilanarussell.com

David Cross is an artist, writer and curator based in Melbourne, Australia. Working across performance, installation, video and photography, his art practice explores the relationship between pleasure, intimacy and the phobic often incorporates participation by linking performance art with object-based environments. As a curator Cross has produced a number of temporary public projects, including One Day Sculpture (with Claire Doherty) across New Zealand in 2008-09, and Iteration: Again in Tasmania in 2011. He recently co-founded the research initiative Public Art Commission (PAC) at Deakin University which is devoted to the commissioning and scholarship of temporary public art. Recent PAC projects all co-developed with Cameron Bishop include, Treatment with Melbourne Water and City of Wyndham (2015. 2017, 2021), Venetian Blind with European Cultural Centre, Venice (2019), Six Moments in Kingston for the City of Kingston (2019) and Front Beach Back Beach (2022). Cross is currently Professor of Visual Arts and Co-Director of PAC at Deakin University, Melbourne.
davidcrossartist.com.au
publicartcommission.com

Access
The Mantra Hotel Observatory Room can be accessed from Mantra reception or from Cypress Avenue. This is also the location of the Biennale's 'Tidal Movements' film screenings. Parking along Cypress Avenue or the beach carpark next to HAH Lorne Beach Cafe.

This project was made possible by the Australian Government Regional Arts Fund, which supports the arts in regional and remote Australia, and Regional Arts Victoria.

Image: Shane Thomson, Urchin Creative.

Kerrie Poliness

BEACH DRAWING
22 March, 12–5pm
Erskine River Estuary, Lorne Beach

BOOK HERE

Kerrie Poliness is known for her painting and drawing works that revisit the ideas and practices of conceptual art. She uses everyday materials to produce large scale asymmetrical geometric artworks which respond to the place in which they are made. 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 represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Edwina Stevens

SONIC ACTIVATION
22 March, 4pm
Site 9, Lorne Beach boardwalk

BOOK HERE

Edwina Stevens (Otepoti/Dunedin, Naarm/Melbourne) is an audiovisual artist working across composition, installation and live performance, focusing on environmental recordings, found acoustic elements, obsolete media and synthesised sound. For Sculpture+ Stevens will sonically activate Carly Fischer's sculptural installation When you strip everything away, it's just you looking out 2025. In this performative engagement, the metal components of the sculptures will be activated using surface transducers, transforming the sculptures into acoustic resonant bodies. Drawing on environmental recordings taken from Artillery Rocks as well as site-responsive synthesised sound, this sonic activation is intended to extend on generative dialogues between the materialities of the sculptures and the sites they respond to, through closer listening and quieter performative gestures. This event will be preceded by an artist talk by Carly Fischer.

DarkQuiet Overnight

DARKQUIET OVERNIGHT
MADELEINE FLYNN, TIM HUMPHREY & JENNY HECTOR
22 March, 8pm
Meet at Biennale site 2, Lorne Beach carpark

BOOK HERE

DarkQuiet is the collaborative project of Naarm/Melbourne based artists Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey and Jenny Hector. Formed in 2020, this collective creates sound and light installations to explore principles and practices that consider their ecological impacts. For Sculpture+, DarkQuiet will activate this work through a nocturnal site walk led by the artists, using red head torches to explore the subtle sensory experience around and nearby the ‘attunement space’ of their artwork.

Lucy Allinson

SOUNDWALK
23 March, 10.30am–1pm
Meet at Lorne Community Connect

BOOK HERE

Lucy Allinson is a multi-disciplinary emerging artist who works with sound, installation, sculpture, photography, and painting. Her research-based practice concerns noise pollution and the detrimental effects it has on natural soundscapes. Lorne and the Otways have been a recurrent site for her field recording in the last five years, tracking birdsong and documenting how levels of noise pollution interfere with soundscape ecologies. To complement her Biennale installation Consuming the landscape 2025, Allinson will host a soundwalk around Lorne focusing on listening, acoustic ecology, noise pollution, and liminal soundscapes. The artist will lead participants on a walk to Erskine River Rapids, then back to her sound installation at Site 14 of the Biennale.

Gretel Taylor

BODYWEATHER WORKSHOP: THE ESTUARY
23 March, 2–5pm
Erskine River estuary, Gadubanud Country, Lorne, Victoria
Meet at Erskine River Swing Bridge picnic area

BOOK HERE

Gretel Taylor will facilitate a place-responsive movement workshop introducing sensory activities derived from Body Weather. Body Weather investigates the intersections of bodies and their environments. Bodies are conceived not as fixed and separate entities, but as constantly changing - just like the weather. The term and philosophical basis for Body Weather was founded in the early 1980s in Japan by dancer Min Tanaka and further developed by proponents worldwide. On beautiful Gadubanud Country in Lorne, we will observe and move with the varied qualities of sites around the estuary, generating improvised embodied responses. This workshop is suited to artists and anyone interested in exploring the body, physical presence and relationships to place.

Rhae Kendrigan

THE STRANDLINE, PERFORMANCE
29 March, 4pm
Meet at Erskine River Swing Bridge picnic area

BOOK HERE

The Strandline explores the intertidal zone of Lorne beach, what it has been and will become. Emerging from the swampy floodplain of the ancient Otway basin, where dinosaurs roamed along fast flowing rivers, a unique marine creature lives on the harsh edges of tidal habitat. As the swamps have become ranges through tectonic uplifting, and the shoreline reaches towards its final release point from Antarctica, we find ourselves in a place between tides and times. As we continue to drift north and the shore platform imperceptibly retreats, considering the deep geological time of this region, what is the future you can imagine for this place?

Gretel Taylor

A NASCENT TETHERING, PERFORMANCE
29 March, 4.30pm
Meet at Erskine River Swing Bridge picnic area

BOOK HERE

Gretel Taylor is a dancer, artist, curator and researcher. Her site-responsive performance works often interrogate settler-colonial presence on unceded Aboriginal Country, and colonisation's relatedness to ecocide. A nascent tethering is a performance responding to the site of the Erskine River estuary. From the position of a colonial body seeking to merge with—rather than possess—this place, Gretel Taylor topples the detachment of her forebears, starts to weave strands of connection, and listens through her senses to move with its currents.

Rhae Kendrigan

NESTED WORKSHOP
30 March, 10–2pm (meet 9:45am)
Meet at Point Grey Picnic Area

BOOK HERE

Nested workshops explore deepening our connection to our bodies, the environment and each other. Using practices grounded in Bodyweather, Rewilding, Buddhism and Regenerative Practice. In this workshop Rhae will take you on a series of gentle embodied investigations, connecting to the natural surroundings of Lorne. We will explore learning from nature through deep listening and new perspectives. The workshop is open to, and suitable for anyone who has an interest in learning more about embodied practices and applying them to their work, creative practice, community and personal life.