This painting is sited on the outside wall of a small gallery on the corner of Furneaux and Bougainville St Manuka. The gallery has operated more or less continuously since 1981 when it started as an artist-run initiative called Bitumen River Gallery. It has been a place where many artists have held their first exhibitions, and as such is a site of arts community history in Canberra.

‘Titled’ honours this role. The composition is a series of exhibition titles held here, each representing a year in the gallery’s history. They are arranged mostly sequentially, and overlaid on an abstract painting based on the geometric happenstance of my current plastic textile works. The titles I chose were ones that I simply liked or that I remembered seeing or by people who are dear to me. The list reads like an absurdist poem.

The first title in the sequence is the exception: [Insert Title Here], a title of an exhibition by Belle (Beau) Palmer in 2019. This title sums up the conundrum artists often face when they have to decide on a title for an exhibition, often many months or more ahead of the work being completed. Titling of works, or of bodies of work as they appear in exhibitions is not actively taught at art school. It’s one of the things you are asked to produce when you propose an exhibition, and there seems to be a culture around making it intriguing. It’s interesting to me that this aspect of working as an artist seems to be considered something you just have to work out on your own.

I have an excel spreadsheet kindly compiled by an intern at Canberra Contemporary, but that was part of my proposal for this work, and there are over six hundred exhibitions listed. Forthcoming is a work that lists every exhibition to date which I am planning to release as a zine/colouring book in 2026.