Mucosa is the first collaborative project between South Australian artists Kate Bohunnis and Kate Power. The work is a consideration of shared ideas of power, desire, queer identity, social relations and how these are stored in the body. Following a decade of friendship, this collaboration embraces trust through not knowing and valuing conversation over mastery as a way to create new perspectives.
Through experimentation with gesture, material limits are tested with a confluence between holding and collapsing to challenge systems of control, offering an alternative of empowering vulnerability and humorous deviation. In having a conversation between materials and differing approaches to touch, this new work embodies a process of squirming out of power structures. Suggesting a symbiosis and employing friendship as a methodology for making, we hope to propose a precarious optimism.
Based in Tarntanya (Adelaide), Kate Bohunnis works in metal, mould-making, textiles, print and sound. Focusing on identity, gender and queer perspectives, Bohunnis’ installations connect materials with psychological states and behaviours. This material performativity is either enacted on its own, or posturing and interacting with another to create a new structural system or tenuous imbalance.
Bohunnis is a graduate from Flinders University with First Class Honours. The recent winner of the 2021 Ramsay Art Prize, Bohunnis has exhibited at the Art Gallery of South Australia, STATION Melbourne, ACE Open, Firstdraft, BLINDSIDE, Praxis ARTSPACE, FELTspace, Sister Gallery, PICA and various group exhibitions throughout South Australia. Upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at COMA in Sydney.
Kate Power is an artist and writer living and working in Tarntanya (Adelaide). Her practice embraces video, performance, textiles, sculpture, text and installation to investigate coexistence and enforced social constructions that can complicate the way people relate to one another.
Power has presented work at the Art Gallery of South Australia for fineprint magazine, Vitalstatistix, West Space, Ace Open, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, BLINDSIDE, Seventh Gallery and FELTspace, among others. She has undertaken residencies at The British School at Rome, NARS Foundation in Brooklyn and SIM in Reykjavik, Iceland. Power is a 2020 recipient of the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Art Scholarship.
Image: Kate Bohunnis & Kate Power, Mucosa 2021 (detail). Courtesy the artist. Photo: Sam Roberts.
