GABO | Donna Marcus | Solo Exhibition

About

The exhibition GABO comprises ten works in total, eight of which are titled GABO i-viii (2022-2023). Two further works, Pulse (2023) and Hull (2026), round out the exhibition.

The GABO i-viii builds on an earlier work, Five Tattings (2022), which took as its reference The D’Oyley Show (1973), a landmark Australian feminist exhibition celebrating domestic crafts, including lacemaking, crochet, and embroidery. That lineage runs through the eight GABO works, made from highly perforated aluminium kitchenware that the artist accumulated over thirty years. Their radiating patterns, amplified by integrated LEDs, hold two visual worlds at once: the delicate geometries of lace and the harder language of industrial form.

The tension between those two worlds is not only aesthetic. It is biographical. The artist’s mother lived aboard the SS Gabo, a ship moored at Berrys Bay on Sydney Harbour in the early twentieth century, where an unlikely community made their lives amid the work of shipbuilding and wrecking. Berrys Bay was also a recurring subject for Australian modernists, including Grace Cossington Smith and Roland Wakelin, who were drawn to its industrial harbour landscape.

Inside that landscape, the artist’s grandmother, Mrs Nielsen, hung lace curtains across the portholes of a home that was slowly being taken apart around her. It is the elusive image of spherical windows veiled by filigreed fabric that informs Marcus’s GABO i-viii, the motif is multiplied and geometricised in metal,…