“Johanna van der Linden and Natalie Tirant encapsulate the unknown, and distort the viewer’s perception of what the human form is in Slip/Hold. It is squashed, pressed, disgruntled, close, slippery, and held” - excerpt from the exhibition essay by Rachel van der Linden
An amazing weekend showing some work alongside @jodorothy Thanks to everyone who came by! ✨
Slip/Hold open today and tomorrow 11-3pm, 116 Miller Street Preston.
Thank you to everyone who came to the opening last night!
"I'm left with a feeling of obscurity, not entirely sure of the specificity that van der Linden and Tirant have portrayed. Yet in them, I grasp at familiarity, and I have a sense that although I cannot label what I see, I know they belong to me"- Part of exhibition essay by Rachel van der Linden.
Still a few works which have not sold, come and say hello!
Slip/Hold a joint exhibition with Johanna van der Linden. Centring on the body’s surface, where contact, tension and slippage meet. Through photography, printmaking and painting, the works trace the body’s shifting edges, sometimes precise, sometimes dissolving, revealing form as both physical and felt.
Opening Friday 8 May, 6-8pm
Exhibition open Fri-Sun, 11-3pm
116 Miller Street, Preston
@jodorothy
Slip/Hold opening at 116 Miller street Preston Friday 8 May.
Excited to be showing new paintings and prints alongside @natalietirant ’s beautiful photos!
Poster by @hayden_daniel
It’s our final day of 2025, and what a year it has been. We’re open until 6pm today, so if you’re passing through Collingwood, pop in and say hello. Pictured here is Deposition Study (Steel) by Johanna van der Linden, a two-part work comprising etching on paper and steel.
This work draws from found imagery of young US Marine soldiers climbing a greased obelisk, their bodies slipping, tangling, and straining against gravity. Their faces strained and grimacing. Johanna isolates and crops these moments of collective effort, folding them into compositions that recall Baroque and medieval depictions of Christ’s body being lowered from the cross. Limbs press against one another, torsion accumulates, and the body becomes a site of burden and offering. In these repetitions, gestures of devotion reappear not really as belief. Maybe more as physical necessity? The need to hold, to support, to endure.
The image of US Marines climbing a greased pole is already a ritualised performance. It’s not functional training in any practical sense. It seems symbolic, repetitive, and staged. The act tests endurance, discipline, and collective coordination, but it also operates as spectacle. Bodies made to strain, slip, and persevere under observation. In this way, it closely mirrors religious ritual. A codified action repeated over time to produce belief, cohesion, and myth. The grease ensures failure is built into the act. Ascent is never clean or singular.
The US military is not only one of the most ritualised institutions of the modern state, but also a locus of contemporary neo-imperial power. Exporting force, ideology, and spectacle across borders under the language of protection, freedom, and order. Its rituals are carefully aestheticised. Uniforms, choreographed movement, symbols of sacrifice, and narratives of heroism designed to naturalise violence and supremacy. By drawing specifically from US Marines rather than a generic or anonymous military body, Johanna situates the work within a global visual economy shaped by American power, where images of endurance and unity are mobilised to legitimise intervention and control.
** continued in comments **
"Transmute" continues at @oddanygallery this Thursday-Saturday.
New work by myself, @maximilianharley and @brigidmeredith_
The mistake would be to think that the body is always its immediacy; that there is something pure about the
body; that a “return” to the body is a return to truth without interception. The human body was nature.
The human body is
nature—
But nature is a slum shanty, and rickety metal is as
natural as the green.
Writing by @lillian_phillips
Thanks @mackinleyfabrication for the fabrication 🖤
Documentation by @lolaadamii
