Sally Molloy and Joanna Kitto
“On Holding and Being Held”

In April 2025, Meanjin/Brisbane based artist Sally Molloy spoke with Joanna Kitto about her site-specific intervention in the West Space Window.

On Holding and Being Held emerges from Molloy’s interest in challenging the implied hierarchy of media with a strategically naïve aesthetic and base, slapstick, and absurdist forms of humour. Here, cat litter becomes medium, metaphor and construction tool.

The following is an edited transcript of the conversation that took place.

Joanna Kitto: Good evening Sally, and welcome to West Space. It’s a pleasure to have you here to present your work and speak with us. Can we start by hearing more about your interest in this unusual material, cat litter?

Sally Molloy: Thank you. It’s beautiful to be here on Wurundjeri Country with you all. I want to firstly say a heartfelt thanks to Ronen [Jafari] for assisting me as I finished the work today. He is such a hustler, so helpful and caring.

So, my interest in cat litter is longstanding. I am drawn to the ferality of cat litter. At first, I thought it would be just like a bit of a phase or a gimmick that I tested out, similar to the way I like to troubleshoot my engagement with canvas in my painting practice.

Broadly, I'm interested in the limitations and possibilities of responding to the subject of colonisation as a non-Indigenous person. My kind of turn towards cat litter was a response to a number of artists whose practices use humour as a tactic or a tool to broach broader societal concerns, such as colonisation. Artists like Joan Ross, Helen Johnson, and soda_jerk, who, each in different ways, utilise base, toilet, slapstick, or absurdist forms of humour. In my own work to date, the cat litter—made from recycled paper—has been mostly used to produce very crummy thick handmade paper which is dried and sealed and used as a substrate for paintings. My feeling was that this type of support not only engaged and extended the type of humour I observed in the other artists but located my own responsiveness to issues that arise in everyday life, living and working on stolen land.

My intention was to continue to work in this way with the cat litter and produce a long, thin painting. However, through other risky explorations and conversations, the importance of the material itself began to take over. Carrying on from a work I made for Carpark in Meanjin/Brisbane in 2023, I wondered about ‘filling’ the Window with cat litter, highlighting the space’s capacity to be used as a vessel, container, vitrine, or cupboard. In this way, the site and materials start to gesture toward modes of display and concealment, and also tickle the tension between holding and being held. I’m deeply interested in the ferality of cat litter (among other things); for starters, it is designed to soak up urine and poo, and is also carried in the pockets of theatre ushers to sprinkle on puddles of vomit that may emerge during a matinee. In some ways, cat litter allows us to defer accountability or labour and in other ways, it is performing labour in its own right. Cat litter brings up associations of purity and contamination which are central provocations in critical race theory. Cat litter, unlike paint, is dry-waiting-to-be-wet. It is capable of holding but is also held. These and other associations fuel my interest in the material.

I’m starting to think that the dry cat litter is too elegant, whereas wet, it becomes more unruly, starts to disintegrate, starts to smell, congeal and clump. The big question is, what is the liquid component? Mark Shorter’s (one of my art idols) advice was to make it as revolting as possible [laughs] I love this. But I also like the possibility of using water to introduce the potency of another site as in Tim Woodward’s Three Aqueous Events and Theresa Margoles’s Proximity to the Scene. I also like the idea of neutralising the functionality of the cat litter by soaking it in cleaning fluid. Another approach might be to soak up spills or to use the cat litter in a more construction-like way, pulp it down with whatever and use it to produce a cast of the Window space itself (a la Rachel Whiteread or Hany Armanious).

In the end, what happened here today was more experimental than we even anticipated.

Joanna: We aim to encourage experimentation with this space, providing the platform to try something new and, importantly, to not be afraid to fail because there is a sense of possibility that can be found in failure. This is a component of our day today in fact. In the process of bringing your work to life, when ‘failure’ — so to speak — led to discovery.

Sally: Yes, absolutely. What happened today was that we had to very quickly change course in the making process of the work. The cat litter that I had been soaking, and blending, and making into matter similar to a sludgey concrete to coat the inside of the Window in, became too unruly - too wet - to keep working with. It breached the perimeters of the site in unexpected ways.

When we realised it was becoming untenable, rather than panicking, I very quickly became energised by the possibilities of this ‘failure’. I started thinking about what it could then lead to. There was a spark of joy in the thought, "where do we go from here?"

Joanna: You were so calm in that moment where you needed to dramatically change tact, and it unfolded almost like a performance, the residue of which we are now sitting in front of. You also speak about the way it soaks up and absorbs matter, transforming and performing a kind of labour in the process. Its job is to soak up moisture. Today the cat litter failed at that job. It rebelled.

Sally: Right. The kitty litter has a purpose, performing an act of service in what it does. When it is dry, it is waiting to perform its labour. Today, when wet, rather than absorbing liquid it became rebellious, as you say, which I think is an idea that runs through all the things that I make and think and write and do. I use materials in a way that goes against what they are ‘meant to do’.

Something that I love is trusting the materials I’m working with to tell me something or show me something. It’s like an invitation through making — trusting materials and seeing what materials can do when they're not smothered with imagery. I think what I've discovered through letting this material lead me is that there is meaningfulness in the most unlikely places.

Joanna: There is also a play on the hierarchy of materials in artistic practice that is present here. Inside the gallery at the moment, in Phuong Ngo’s exhibition Inheritance, we have an example of what might be considered the apex: marble. Then here, we have something that might be considered at the lower end of this spectrum. But kitty litter is also something that elicits a very visceral reaction.

Sally: Yeah! The texture and smell. The grossness. Fundamentally it's designed to soak up it piss and shit. In the process of developing this work, I was talking to Mark Shorter, who  was telling me that when he worked as an usher in a theatre, they would walk around with cat litter in their pockets to sprinkle on vomit. It’s designed to absorb these disgusting substances. For me, that makes it loaded with potential. Here in the Window, it’s in its dry format - waiting to perform its job. And it looks quite beautiful? It’s masquerading as something elegant or … something suspiciously like contemporary art. But it’s just cat litter.

Joanna: In the West Space Window, you’ve used both the materials and the site to play with the tension between holding and being held. You’ve transformed the Window into a vitrine or vessel, harnessing the architecture to create a frame for the material and conceptually gesture towards the idea of what we hold onto, archive, put on display, spend time considering or admiring…

Sally: Yeah. Putting cat litter on display creates a type of tension. This is a strategy for me — to use humour to approach very big, difficult, unruly topics in contemporary culture. I’m interested in the tension between display and concealment, which are absolutely part of the colonial apparatus. There is also a question around who has the right to perform, to be seen, in what roles and what spaces.

Alongside this framework of thinking around tenions, I’m thinking about what needs to be more feral—what it means to be unruly, to act in ways that might not be deemed socially acceptable—to go against the norm. Also what it means to dwell in unbelonging. I’m interested in small, subtle ways to create different worlds or different realities as a way of troubling ways to exist outside of the binary.

For me, it's about loosening your grip on things. You can't control what is meaningful for people viewing your work. You can only set up a scaffold in which dots can be joined according to each person's own logic.

Joanna: The title of this work is On Holding and Being Held. Can you tell us where this phrase came from, and what it means to you?

Sally: I had a conversation with a friend in the lead up to having this show, and we were talking about how in this time there is a kind of hopelessness and futility. It can feel really hard ... but we have the option to love one another as best as we can. Love is this radical act in the face of uncertainty, and can help us to rebuild, and so I was thinking about how  community is about holding one another and how you, you simultaneously hold and are held in community.

Here, cat litter is designed to hold, and it's also being by this window, and I felt like that was a poetic way of introducing this metaphor for community and the idea that relationships don’t just flow one way.

Joanna: Thank you, Sally.

Sally: Thank you so much for having me.

This public conversation look place as part of the opening celebration of On Holding and Being Held in the West Space Window, 17 April → 26 May 2025.