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Grit

COMING SOON

8 May – 9 August 2026

Grit is an exhibition drawn from works in the Edith Cowan University Art Collection, bringing together artists who use materiality to explore belonging, custodianship, colonial resistance, and relationships to place. For many Aboriginal artists, natural materials such as ochres, bark, native fibres, and resin are not simply mediums, but living connections to Country.

These materials carry ancestral knowledge and cultural continuity. The act of gathering and working with them becomes an assertion of enduring connection, and a testament to the strength of Aboriginal culture in the face of colonisation.

In dialogue with this, non-Aboriginal artists engage with local, weathered materials and historical references to examine the layered colonial histories embedded within the places they inhabit. Their works often reflect on questions of belonging, interrogating ideas of ownership and acknowledging the responsibilities that come with living on and benefiting from unceded land.

The exhibition spans a wide range of material approaches, including painting, photography, ceramics, sculpture, wood carving, video, ochre, drawing, printmaking, collage, glass, textiles, and found materials. Across these practices, materiality is not incidental but integral—each artist’s chosen medium is inseparable from the ideas and histories their work conveys.

Curator: Matthew McAlpine

Image Credit : Nigel Hewitt, Reformation, 2018, Edith Cowan University Art Collection, A2963

Nigel Hewitt, Reformation, 2018, Edith Cowan University Art Collection A2963
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