The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Homecoming is a publication launch and the final exhibition in ‘Hot Compost Home Tour’, a home-based touring series that has unfolded over several months in Naarm, culminating with a shared reading of a text by artist and writer Anna Dunnill.

Writing alongside the tour, Anna follows a quilt that travels to three different homes in turn, for a month each. Each leg of the home tour is curated by the home’s occupant, and carries a different expression of what a ‘home’ means and how a quilt might function within it. A house lived in continuously for thirty-seven years. A one-bedroom flat on a month-to-month lease. A space extending beyond the walls of the house into community gardens and schools.

Join us for a publication launch and shared reading with collaborators involved in the tour, hosted in Emily Simek’s rental unit. Each attendee will receive a limited edition zine.

• Sunday 1st December 2 - 4pm
• All welcome, RSVP essential
• 1/10 Holmes Street, Brunswick East

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Hot Compost Home Tour is an off-site exhibition series by Emily Simek in collaboration with Merri Cheyne, Anna Dunnill, Eric Jong, Mei Sun and Doug Webb. The home-based tour explores composting as an approach to exhibition practice. Using relational ethics as a framework, the project considers the conditions of the various exchanges that ‘create’ compost: how and where does it come to exist? How are different collaborators implicated? Instead of a purely material process, composting becomes about the work of relationships within systems of exchange.

This project is supported by a VCA50 Creative Development Grant, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne.

Crossing by Raghav Kumar and Addin Sugarda presents a dialogue between personal histories and cultural inheritances, exploring the ways individuals navigate the intersections of memory, heritage, and identity. Through distinct yet interwoven practices, the artists reconstruct fragmented narratives to interrogate belonging and self-definition.

Raghav Kumar's work draws on documentary photography and archival imagery to reflect on his upbringing in a refugee household shaped by the Partition of India. His site-specific installation combines contemporary photographs with family archives, reconstructing the layered micro-histories of his ancestral home and migrant experience in Australia. This deeply personal exploration positions photography as a medium of intergenerational healing, bridging the disjointed perceptions of past and present to forge a renewed, albeit fragmented, sense of belonging.

Similarly, Addin Sugarda’s work transforms the inherited weight of cultural expectations into intricate ceramic sculptures, paintings and installations. Reimagining Javanese heirlooms, Sugarda challenges traditional notions of filial piety within contemporary Indonesian society. Their performative practice, incorporating vocalisations and shadow puppetry, expands on the cathartic act of reshaping inherited narratives, offering a visceral meditation on emancipation and the evolving relationship between heritage and individuality.

Together, Raghav and Addin navigate the delicate balance between reverence and rupture, weaving their personal narratives into broader cultural discourses. Their works engage viewers in a contemplative space where the deeply personal becomes a lens for understanding collective experiences of memory, loss, and transformation. Through this exhibition, the artists invite us to reflect on how we reconstruct identity amidst the residues of history and tradition, forging new pathways toward healing and liberation.

Sapphic Reading and Writing is a six-week, practice-led course designed to support the creative and intellectual development of writers and artists identifying with the sapphic experience, such as among those who are lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, transgender femme, masc, and non-binary. Blending online and in-person sessions, the course offers a unique space for mentorship and artistic growth, enriched by engagement with literary and visual materials.

Led by Ange Glindemann—writer, editor, researcher, and board member at Seventh—this summer program will explore key sapphic themes within both art and literature. Participants will critically engage with influential texts by Anne Carson, Audre Lorde, Monique Wittig, Adrienne Rich, Sara Ahmed, and Jack Halberstam, supported by an extensive supplementary reading list for those keen to explore further. Key themes include queer temporality, low theory, queer use, compulsory heterosexuality, the embodied experience in the lesbian body, the political dimensions of poetry and literature, and lesbian invisibility, among others. The course will also examine significant artworks by both historical and contemporary sapphic artists.

An integral component of this course is collaboration with the Women’s Art Register, where participants will create original written responses to archival materials. The curriculum is further enriched by guest lectures from local academics, artists and writers, fostering a dynamic and multi-faceted exploration of sapphic identity.

Ange Glindemann is a queer and neurodivergent writer, poet and editor based in Naarm. She is a PhD candidate at RMIT, where she is studying situated and spatial writing, and she works as an editor for Books+Publishing, as well as being a member of the board for Seventh Gallery, for which she runs the annual Emerging Writers’ Program.

In her creative practice, she is preoccupied with everyday aesthetics, spatial writing, and ekphrasis, as well as fragmentary and digital writing experiments. She has written for publications such as Archer Magazine, Un Extended and Rabbit, and has participated in several arts writing programs, including the 2022 Writing in the Expanded Field program through ACCA and RMIT’s non/fictionLab.

Course Outcomes

Upon concluding the course, participants will collectively produce a publication that captures the thematic and creative explorations undertaken throughout the program. The gallery will serve as an active studio space, enabling participants to engage in process-based creation and reflection. This will culminate in an exhibition comprising ephemera, notes, visual art, and textual fragments — articulating the collective developmental journey of participants within the course.

The publication launch and the exhibition’s closing event are scheduled for 22 January 2025.

Course Details

Sessions will be held on five Saturdays across December and January, both online via Zoom and in person at Seventh Gallery.

How to Apply

Places are  limited. To join us in exploring and creating sapphic-centred art and literature, please complete the EOI form. Deadline is midnight, Sunday Dec 1.

Please email Lucie (lucie@seventhgallery.org) if you have any questions, or if you would like to express your interest in a different format.

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Expanding the Field presents a series of public banners that consider the intersections of public space, symbology and collective memory of the Citizens Park site. I have used drawing, camera-less photography and digital design to reimagine the idea of civic belonging and to playfully question ideas of identity and connection to place. I have captured ephemeral moments and unstable traces of public life through documenting direct encounters with the park's textures and temporal qualities, along with elements of archival material and lines of sight from the park. Through processes of deconstruction, tracing and reconfiguring, I have applied features of the coat of arms of the Corporation of the City of Richmond with references to the history of the site as a place of trade, leisure and mutual exchange. Expanding the Field invites viewers to reconsider how banners (and flags), traditionally instruments of proposed civic identity and classification, might instead become vehicles for exploring the fluid, overlapping territories of public space, identity and shared memory.

Famam extendere factis
et mon droit
Spread the word of the facts
and my right

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