Borders

What is a border? Where does it start and where does it end? Borders can create a sense of calm and safety in allowing us to organize and contain information or matter, but they are also provocative in their potential to be pushed outside of, or broken. Borders explores the ways in which borders intersect, blur and connect us. Through drawings, paintings and wood cut prints, artists Liz Breen, Abbey MacDonald and Megan Short explore the ways in which borders - personal and public, physical and invisible - intersect, entwine and create patterns of connections and shared experiences. All share a passion for arts education and the ways in which the arts can soften borders and challenge perceptions. Borders define spaces, the places we inhabit, physically, mentally, spiritually and virtually. Liz Breen’s work explores the cusp of urban and wilderness spaces. Taking inspiration from weather maps, aerial photos of the landscape and the changes between seasons, these works are an abstract response to the patterns in local landmarks or natural borders that define our city and our region - the Tamar River, the Trevallyn Reserve and the Cataract Gorge. Through paint, Abbey MacDonald’s works explore how objects can be contained or liberated, embraced or broken by the border. Through metaphor, and visceral, fluid imaginings, I manipulate line, thread, colour and texture to elicit the dual potentialities I perceive in borders; primarily the sense of exclusion and inclusion, external and internal, comfort and threat. Megan Short's woodcuts of Elizabeth 1 explore the idea of a 'sovereign border'. Territorial borders are used to keep people out and to claim territory, but in doing so we also claim the authority of a 'sovereign'. In contemporary Australia the use of the term 'sovereign border' is curious and the link between the Empire and the politics of today is worth thinking about. The use of woodcuts as a way of repeating the image of the sovereign is also a way to reference the early use of printing in creating propaganda.