ca Gallery is delighted to present
stairseach | thresholds
an exhibition by Joolie Gibbs and Katie Harris-MacLeod
10 June to 3 July, 2025
Opening night Saturday 14 June, 4 – 6 pm
Both artists work with similar botanical materials and a deep connection to nature, but reveal the many differences in their approaches to their separate practices. Using the title (in Scottish Gaelic and English), they test the threshold of representation. Katie’s loose, uninhibited, free and unfettered style of mark making is in stark contrast to Joolie’s tighter, and controlling containment of wallum representations.
Joolie Gibbs
Joolie Gibbs enjoys being provincial as a regional Queensland artist living and creating in Gympie (Kabi Kabi country). Gibbs completed her Master of Art in Visual Art (MAVA) in 2014 at Griffith University Queensland College of Art, and is influenced by walking and documenting her natural surroundings through the connections with the Mary River and the region. From insects, her 5-acre property, the Wallum, big trees and forests and the effects of floods, she finds meaning and direction for her practice. Her aim is to be part of the solution rather than the problem in her own small way.
Using strong drawing skills and very time consuming, controlled, deliberate and mindful processes from the integrity of making her own botanical inks to the final mark making, Gibbs incorporates the macro/micro easily from work on paper on a large scale (up to 9m), to minute drawings. It keeps her going and makes her heart sing.
Katie Harris-MacLeod
In this body of work, Scottish-Australian artist Katie Harris-MacLeod explores interwoven themes of kinship, ecological intimacy, mortality, bodily memory, thresholds, and the more-than-human. Each drawing emerges as a layered response to the emotional and psychological complexities of these states and relationships, shaped by the landscapes from which they have taken form.
The drawings are grounded in a site-responsive, materially sensitive approach. Each work evolves through slow, embodied processes of gathering, preparing, and applying materials – both organic and anthropogenic – sourced from specific locations across Scotland and Australia. Materials such as tree sap, salt and copper oxide ink are integral to this practice, each selected for its intrinsic chemistry, symbolism, and ecological resonance. These substances are not passive but active collaborators: they move, react, and age within the work, creating a living archive of place, body, and time.
Through these processes, the drawings trace a quiet yet profound shift in MacLeod’s understanding of identity and belonging, revealing an ongoing dialogue between body, memory, and the environments that shape and remember them.
Pleease contact the gallery on (07) 5471 7366 or [email protected] for all inquiries. An online catalogue will be available for this exhibition in the coming weeks.
