Contemporary science tells us that memory is not fixed. It has a mind of its own and is wonderfully, and frustratingly, unpredictable. It can be triggered by the most unexpected things, distort details, rearrange events and bring something long forgotten suddenly rushing back. Memory is also deeply connected to our senses. A smell, a texture, a sound, an image or the feel of a familiar object can conjure the past into the present. It can be an inkling, or an overwhelming bodily experience.
For centuries, we humans have found ways to hold on to our memories. Stories and song, poetry and painting, folklore and photography, mathematics and maps have helped us capture and carry memories from one generation to the next. We have always used the physical world to keep tabs on our past.
Material Memory explores the relationship between memory and the physical world, asking how materials influence what we remember, and how what we remember influences the materials we choose to keep, make and transform.
For the four artists in this exhibition, making, collecting, preserving, wearing and reworking are not simply actions performed upon materials. They are ways of processing experience and creating new meanings. The past is not recovered intact; it is continually reconstructed through our encounters with the material world. Together, their practices confirm that material is not a passive container for memory, but an active participant in how memory is formed, altered and carried forward.
Polly Hollyoak begins with deeply personal material. Familiar domestic objects become points of departure for paintings that explore the relationship between memory and material presence. While the objects originate within her own family history, they move beyond autobiography to consider how everyday things can come to embody experience and the passage of time.
Far from being mere relics or sentimental keepsakes, Hollyoak’s paintings give memories a new material life, functioning as anchors that physically secure the intangible in the real world.
For Karryn Argus, memory is closely tied to the materials she uses in her practice. The artist often begins with a fragment of clothing… perhaps an apron frill, from her collection of materials sourced from her own and others’ domestic lives. Stitch by stitch, repeated gestures accumulate in the cloth. Often this occurs while the artist is engaged in a sort of ‘reverie’ thinking about Australian Modernist women painters.
In her work, memory is not simply recalled; it is built through repetition and embedded in the material. By taking these familiar domestic textiles out of their everyday context, she shifts their meaning, transforming them through countless small acts into a slow, deliberate physical record.
Jasminka Ward-Matievic works with discarded clothing and textiles, materials that already carry histories of use, ownership and association. Through transformation and reuse, she disrupts their previous meanings and gives them new lives.
Her work asks us to consider how the value of an object changes when its original purpose is lost—and how memory, like material, can be altered, repurposed and understood differently over time.
Sally D’Orsogna‘s cyanotypes are created through direct physical contact between light, objects and photosensitive surfaces. Rather than depicting a memory, they record an encounter: an object leaves a trace, but not a complete picture. The resulting images are delicate and often fragmentary, suggesting something fundamental about memory itself. Reminding us that what remains is not necessarily the whole story.
Although these artists work across different media and begin from different concerns, each treats material as active rather than passive. Objects, cloth, pigment and light do not simply hold meaning; they participate in creating it.
Together, the works suggest that memory is not a fixed record of the past. It is something we continually reconstruct through what we keep, what we make, what we transform, and most importantly, what we make visible to be shared and carried forward.
Jenny Port
2026