Gertrude Glasshouse will host Permanent Marker, a solo exhibition by Tara Denny, presenting a new body of work that interrogates the relationship between ownership, personal history, and artistic expression. The exhibition finds the artist navigating themes of boundaries and communication through a series of sculptures.
Denny’s practice is profoundly shaped by her personal history as a survivor of psychosis, an experience that necessitated relearning language and fostered a reliance on non-verbal forms of communication. Her studio process is described as a secluded and intense purging of charged emotions, a method of rediscovering personal control. This history informs the physical and conceptual basis of her work. The sculptures in the skyline series are the product of this intensely private dialogue, created from an array of found and repurposed materials including wood, plastic, and fragments of a leather jacket, alongside malleable substances like wax, which the artist stretches and reshapes by hand.
The resulting assemblages are ambiguous yet deliberate, bearing the literal impressions of the artist’s hand. Denny employs what is described as an “obsessively codified system of gestures,” which alludes to a longer history of women artists and poets who have navigated societal expectations through idiosyncratic and personal trajectories. The works are presented as a reflection on a culture of property and consumption, placed in direct contrast to the more complex notion of self-possession.
This use of a codified, private language is most explicitly realized in Denny’s adoption of shorthand. Influenced by the local concrete poet Thalia, the artist incorporates the arcane script into her work. For the piece skyline_vip, a phrase recalled from graffiti in a psychiatric ward—”I could be on a yacht eating pizza instead I am here”—is translated into shorthand, embedding a deeply personal memory into the sculpture. This act encapsulates the exhibition’s core tension: the translation of an internal, transformative struggle into a tangible, yet still opaque, artistic form.
Permanent Marker will be on view at Gertrude Glasshouse in Collingwood from August 29 to September 27, 2025. An opening reception is scheduled for the evening of Thursday, August 28.
