Chappell, Lawn

Engaging the photograph’s inherent material malleability, Danica Chappell explores numerous historical processes of photography. She works in the darkroom without a camera, constructing shadows through photogrammatic techniques. Within the haptic environment of the darkroom, light, shadow, form, colour, and gesture converge, solidifying as traces that sit between material fact and abstraction. Reconfiguring photographic conventions, her abstracted frames articulate rhythm, cadence, and the agency of light-sensitive substrates.

Minaal Lawn creates sculptural ceramic works marked by her materially restrained and colour-driven vocabulary. Her use of repetition transforms the physical act of making into a profound personal ritual. A powerful sense of multiplicity emerges from the accumulation of her small forms, where her ritualised labour questions the industrialised ideal. Fundamental to identity, she draws on a deep visual tradition of object symbolism, Hindu worship culture and the aesthetics of ritual. Creating intimate autobiographical work that invites viewers to recognize the beauty inherent in sustained devotion.

Chappell, Lawn marked the first time both artists have exhibited at Haydens and with one another, a unification of material driven practices which focus on colour, experimentation, repetition and chance.

Exhibition Catalogue