“Gesture”

Group Exhibition

Anthea Vayonitis, Asha Bowditch, Kaitlin Pignataro, Lucy Apfel, Matilde Augusta, Paul Duldig, and Ruby Tehan 

3rd - 21st December



Exhibition Statement

For the final exhibition of Harlow Gallery’s first year, Gesture brings together a varied group of local contemporary artists responding to gesture through bodies, place, material, and time. Mixing together painting, photography, and textiles from seven artists; Anthea Vayonitis, Asha Bowditch, Kaitlin Pignataro, Lucy Apfel, Matilde Augusta Oviedo, Paul Duldig, and Ruby Tehan, Gesture is an experiment in the exhibition as community building and a celebration of gesture as an artistic practice.

In its eclectic nature, the exhibition folds the subject of gesture through abstract mark making in Vayonitis’s intuitive painting contrasting with Bowditch’s attentive recreation of moments of gestural tenderness. Pignataro and Duldig’s observational street photography captures moments of movement and stillness in public spaces and Apfel and Oviedo’s honest materiality shows the production of work as material expression. At the centre of this collection, Tehan’s textile ribbon is shown as a collective memory of the labour of its production, the material outcome of the repetitive gestural production of weaving.

List of Artists

Anthea Vayonitis

Anthea Vayonitis, a contemporary artist, works through an intuitive process that inspires the  lyrical abstraction of spiritual contexts and metaphysical energies found in nature. Meditation, music, dance, and nature cultivate channels and pathways for her spontaneous and intuitive art practice.

Through dance and meditation practices, Vayonitis explores paint through embodied and sensory painting.

Through these painterly gestures, the painting paints itself as the destination is found in the process. In treating colour as content, my personal lexicon is revealed through the synergy of chromatic shapes and formations. These shapes and formations are found in my conscious and sub-conscious states.

anthemayonitis.com

@anthea_vayonitis

Asha Bowditch

Engrossed by personal observation and obsession, Asha Bowditch’s practice transforms ambiguity into moments of preemptive importance. It toys with an unanswered question; how can one instill meaning into a seemingly meaningless moment?

Underpinned by the time and labor taken to commit an instant to canvas, using movement, stillness and a manipulation of light to capture points of lasting impact. 

The spectacularly mundane, or the spectacular found within mundanity. The daily occurrences that pass without a second of thought. Giving moments the agency to hold so much, without disclosing what exactly it is they are holding.

@ashabowditch

Kaitlin Pignataro

Kaitlin Pignataro (b. 2005, Naarm/Melbourne) is an artist and writer based in Naarm/Melbourne.

Her practice operates at the intersection of image and narrative forms, examining how interiority is articulated, obscured and rehearsed within contemporary visual culture. Working with logics of voyeurism, public/private space and gendered modes of self-presentation, with a particular focus on the private fictions and self-authored narratives that shape relational life.

Kaitlin has exhibited in group shows across Naarm/Melbourne, including at SOL Gallery and Brunswick Street Gallery. Kaitlin’s practice is informed by an ongoing engagement with art-historical methodologies and cultural theory, which both her visual and written work are based on.

She is the Manager and Assistant Curator at William Mora Galleries, Richmond, and holds a BA from the University of Melbourne, where she majored in Art History.

kaitlinpignataro.com

@kaitlin0105 / @kaitlinnbelle

Lucy Apfel

Lucy Apfel works primarily within acrylic mediums and found objects. No matter how bright the painting, there's a sadness so flat washing over, rendering them dull. The canvases are created from off-cuts, glueing and sewing together the discarded bits of primed, non-primed, 8oz, 14oz, canvas people fail to want. Stretched over wooden bars, using a staple gun and flatheads that are far too long for what is standard, none are finished in a clean manner and that's just how it is. There is no aspiration to change this, there is the likes of anti-establishment and no fixing considered to be involved within Apfel’s process. Take it or leave it.

lucyapfel.com

@l_u_c_y_a_p_f_e_l

Matilde Augusta  

Matilde Augusta is a Bolivian born artist currently living and practicing in Naarm. 

Known for exploring development techniques in analogue photography, Matilde’s work is shaped by a sense of exploration. Inspired by her different cultural and academic roots, she fluidly blurs the boundaries between fine art, photography, and science, crafting images that distort, abstract, and reimagine the familiar. 

@maxoqu

Paul Duldig

Paul is an artist working in photography, video, and sound, either in mixed media installations or as stand-alone works. This latest show exhibits a selection of street photography of Brunswick shot over the last five years under the name ‘streetbrunswick’.  Paul has exhibited at Alternating Currents (Windsor), Parallel Projects (Footscray), Disciple Roasters (Brunswick), Barber Black Sheep (Brunswick), and contributed works to Linden New Art ‘Postcards’ (St Kilda) and St Luke’s Colourmen ‘Exquisite Pallette’ (Collingwood). Paul is a member of The Art Room artist community in Footscray.

Uncanny

When I’m taking photos I feel like a child again, seeing things for the first time.

I love the cobbled lanes and people of Brunswick, the in-between spaces that are difficult to walk along and the fleeting interactions. It’s like an altered state.

The artist Robert Irwin says that “seeing is the forgetting of the name of the thing one sees”. How do we do that? How can we see the world afresh?

My photos suggest the experience we sometimes have of everyday things around us suddenly seeming unreal, particularly when we look at them from a different perspective.

The feeling of not recognizing the everyday is known as jamais vu, meaning “never seen”, the opposite of deja vu.

It is a state of mind that artists adopt to really see the world, without their minds telling them what they should be seeing.

www.streetbrunswick.au

@streetbrunswick

paulduldig.art

Ruby Tehan

Ruby Tehan is a textile and visual artist born and raised in Naarm/Melbourne. She has a strong desire to connect with the past makers of her craft. Finding history and connection with the lost and forgotten women of the past, her focus is on respecting the significant and constant learning and story telling that occurs in textiles. She also examines how the grief and tragedy of womanhood intertwines with its strength and beauty. Creating stories and a physical connection to her work, Ruby explores what it means to be attached to our world, each other and how we cope with love and everyday melancholia. Ruby studied a Certificate IV in Textile Design and Production at RMIT and graduated in 2025.

@shampooshampooshampooshampoo

All artworks featured in this catalogue are available for purchase directly through the artist. Please see link below.