“On Holding and Being Held”
Sally Molloy
17 Apr → 26 May 2025
Window
On Holding and Being Held is a new work by Sally Molloy, created site-specifically for the West Space Window.
On Holding and Being Held emerges from the artist’s interest in the use of base, slapstick, and absurdist forms of humour to broach difficult conversations in artistic practice. Here, cat litter becomes medium, metaphor, and construction tool.
Molloy is interested in the ferality of cat litter. The way it soaks up and absorbs matter, transforming and performing a kind of labour. Here, Molloy transforms recycled paper cat litter into building material, playing on the West Space Window's capacity to vessel, container, or vitrine. She positions the site and materials as a gesture toward modes of display and concealment, ideas of purity and contamination, and the tension between holding and being held.
The West Space Window is supported by City of Yarra through their Annual Grants Program.
Program
Artist talk, Thurs 17 April, 5 → 7pm
Sally Molloy was joined by Joanna Kitto, West Space Director, for a conversation about her practice.
Sally Molloy is a Meanjin/Brisbane based artist challenging the implied hierarchy of media with a strategically naïve aesthetic, crummy materials, and humour. Her practice explores colonial pasts and presents as they relate to her everyday life on Yuggera and Turrbal lands through engagement with the history of Australian landscape painting, the backyard, and popular culture.