“Not an angel, exactly”
Kari Lee McInneny-McRae
24 Oct → 6 Dec 2026
Closing Celebration , 5 Dec, 6 – 8 am
Through disability as a lens, Not an angel, exactly by Kari Lee McInney-McRae considers how bodies, objects and environments remember one another.
The grab rail remembers touch.
The twig remembers blackberry.
The body remembers surgery and diagnosis.
The sculpture remembers making.
The country remembers colonisation.
The archive remembers what institutions overlook.
Everything in this work seems to be carrying a history.
That, to me, is what allows it to become more than an autobiography.
Presented in the West Space Window, Not an angel, exactly, emerges from lived experience with endometriosis, chronic pain, and neurodivergence, and from repeated encounters with medical systems not designed for bodies like McInney-McRae's.
Bringing together sculpture and photography, the work explores how bodies adapt within structures that prioritise endurance over care. Familiar support objects~canes, stools, medical devices~are reconfigured into unstable forms that lean, buckle and shift, holding the tension between support and collapse. Cast bronze twigs, salvaged materials and photographic fragments echo the ongoing, often invisible labour of living with chronic illness.
Created in collaboration with photographer Alaiya, the photographic works position the body within a medical frame while quietly shifting the gaze. Bronze forms rest against skin, suggesting both intrusion and care, inviting viewers to look more slowly and with greater attentiveness.
Informed by queer and disability frameworks, including ideas of crip time and embodied difference, Not an angel, exactly, considers how pain reshapes time, perception, identity, and the body itself. Rather than seeking resolution, the work asks what it means to be seen, to be believed, and to exist within systems that continue to render certain bodies and experiences invisible. What might it mean to witness a body without trying to fix it?
Closing Celebration
Saturday 5 December, 5 → 7pm
Join us for refreshments on our balcony to celebrate with artist Kari Lee McInneny-McRae.
This event takes place as part of Arts Access Victoria's Alter State closing party, with music, performances and art unfolding across Collingwood Yards all evening.
Kari Lee McInneny-McRae (they/them) is a Naarm-based multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, drawing, casting, found objects, and text. They live and work on the unceded lands of the Woiwurrung (Wurundjeri) and Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation. Grounded in queer, Crip, and mad frameworks, Kari Lee’s practice is shaped by lived experience as a nonbinary, disabled, chronically ill and neurodivergent person navigating systems not built for their survival. Their work explores memory, place, and radical modes of rest, resistance, and recovery through process-based making and embodied material engagement.
Using repetitive, rhythm-based techniques, they process complex emotional and political states. Influenced by process philosophy, poetics, and language, Kari Lee approaches art-making as personal and political fieldwork~ acts of care, critique, and quiet resilience. They have exhibited and curated across artist-run and commercial spaces in Naarm/Melbourne and Mparntwe/Alice Springs. Their practice resists pathologisation and invites connection through intimate, tactile, and affective gestures.