Tender 2025

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Tender is an exhibition explores acts of resistance and care.

Emerging artist and curator Shelley Watters brings together Stephanie Beaupark, Eden Crain, Amani Haydar, Laurence Kimmel, Rochelle Morris, Kath O'Donnell, Emily Simek, Juundaal Strang-Yettica, Shelley Watters, Estelle Yoon and Wendy Qi Zhang - women artists of multiple ages, working across artistic disciplines, ideas, cultures and topographies. Together, these artists explore tenderness at the intersection of earth and people care.

Estelle Yoon, Amani Haydar and Eden Crain work across photo/video, painting and installation respectively, to explore familial tenderness, loss, and dislocation within their art. Rochelle Morris and Shelley Watters, grounded in ecofeminism, examine entanglement, land-trauma and grief through assemblages and installations - often with found or fallen living materials. Juundaal Strang-Yettica, uses her alter-ego Sister Gillternullius to pose new ways of working that are decolonised, relational, and social, to highlight the Anthropogenic environmental crisis. Stephanie Beaupark specialises in facilitating Indigenous-led knowledge exchange through the art and science of eco-dyeing. Emily Simek is interested in collective practices spanning digital art, textiles, installation, writing and gardening. Wendy Qi Zhang and Kath O'Donnell primarily use digital realms, to explore empathy, interconnectedness of creatures, cultures and technologies to create speculative futures. Laurence Kimmel's oil painting practice expresses architectural visions of threshold and liminal spaces, with her painting installation for Tender depicting speculative habitats for the bilby in response to and in collaboration with O'Donnell's work.

In The Land in Our Bones: Plancestral Herbalism and Healing Cultures from Syria to the Sinai, Lebanese American author Layla K. Feghali says 'our feminism of soil and soul, is grounded in ﺃَﻣَﻞ amal 'hope' as the abiding force, the core that continuously calls on us to return to it, to invigorate our search for, and action towards liberation…'.

Tender is supported by Inner West Council and includes an opening event, artist talks, a reading circle, and participatory performances. Events will be held each Saturday during the exhibition between 2-4pm.

Image credits: 1: Shelley Watters, Tender, 2025, 2: Amani Haydar, We Swear by the Olives, 2024, 3: Kath O'Donnell, Uncanny Bilby, 4: Laurence Kimmel, Bilby 1, 2025