P R E S E N T   P L A C E

Armando Chant – Sadhbha Cockburn – Justine Roche – Belinda Yee

PRESENT / PLACE explores the idea of landscape not as something fixed or distant, but as something alive shaped by memory, time, and our presence within it. In this exhibition, landscape becomes place: not simply a location on a map, but a shifting space where personal and shared histories gather, where material meets memory, and where meaning is always in the process of becoming.

Bringing together the work of Armando Chant, Sadhbha Cockburn, Justine Roche, and Belinda Yee, this exhibition invites us to look beyond the surface of the landscape and consider how we experience place through layers of feeling, history, imagination, and physical engagement. The artists each approach these ideas from different directions but are united by a deep interest in the ways landscape is felt, remembered, and transformed over time.

Across the exhibition, images of the landscape become more than representations—they become questions. In some works, photographs are disrupted through repetition, erasure or layering, allowing fragments of past and present to coexist in a single image. These gestures draw our attention to what remains visible in a place, and what has quietly slipped from view. Rather than giving answers, these images suggest that the landscape holds traces of what once was, and whispers of what might still be.

Elsewhere, photography is used to distance the viewer from traditional ways of seeing. Landscapes are altered digitally, stripped of clear markers or familiar details, creating space for uncertainty. These moments of ambiguity open the way for new interpretations, encounters shaped not just by the land itself, but by memory, emotion, and projection. Through this, place becomes not a single story, but something open and ever shifting.

This sense of presence is echoed in works that draw directly from the material world. Natural and found materials—earth, fibres, remnants of industry—are gathered and reworked with care and repetition. These tactile processes become a form of attention, anchoring the artist within the landscape and marking time through the body. Here, making becomes a quiet act of being present, of listening to place, and of acknowledging its slow and constant transformation.

The idea of time runs deeply through PRESENT / PLACE. Rather than something linear or contained, time is shown as fluid and layered sedimented in materials, gestures, and the land itself. Through drawing, movement, and process, the artists explore how place is shaped not only by what is seen, but by what is felt across time: personal histories, cultural memories, and the passing moments of now. In doing so, they invite us to consider how landscape is always changing, and how we are changed by it in return.

Ultimately, PRESENT / PLACE is not about defining where we are, but about holding space for the many ways we come to know, sense, and imagine place. Moving through the exhibition, we are asked to slow down, to listen, and to consider how place lives within us—and how we, too, leave our mark upon it.