Edition Five

8 - 26 March 2024 | Broadhurst Gallery, Hazelhurst Arts Centre

With or without the visibility they deserve, women artists have engaged with printmaking since its beginning. And yet, due to its nature as physically demanding and requiring artistic virtuosity, printmaking was deemed man’s labour and not suitable for women. This left them at the peripheries of art history despite playing an integral role within the medium’s revolution, calling gender into question as it spanned social and technological transformation. This gendered relegation led to a longstanding history of women forming collectives and communities in printmaking, gathering to push against dogmatic conditions and advocate for their inclusion in a medium bound in tradition, both societally and artistically.

Surveying the breadth and depth of contemporary print-practice, Edition Five marks More Than Reproduction (MTR)’s fifth anniversary as an artist-run initiative, aligning with International Women’s Day. Demonstrating the malleability of printmaking in both focused and cross-disciplinary practices, the exhibition features recent work by ten artists from MTR’s monthly artist profile program. Underpinned by parallels and polarities, experimentation is at the nucleus of the exhibition, with artists navigating diverse print methodologies and outputs. In this exhibition, printmaking exists within the depths of the past and the surface of the present; where the reproducible and unique converge and co-exist. Although seemingly disparate, the works in Edition Five demonstrate a sense of connectedness, not through a linear inheritance, but rather synchronicity; acausal coincidences, whereby there is unity in diversity.

Featuring Danielle Creenaune, Saskia Haalebos, Angela Hayson, Jacqueline Jacky, Isabella Kennedy, Emilee Robinson, Jenny Robinson, Katika Schultz, Brigitta Summers, and Maria Thaddea.

More Than Reproduction (MTR) is a Sydney-based artist-run printmaking initiative dedicated to strengthening discourse and bolstering printmaking practices in Australia. Founded in March 2019 by artists Jennifer Brady and Millie Mitchell, and curator Sarah Rose, MTR strives to build a sense of creative community, and provide a platform for female-identifying and gender diverse artists at all stages in their careers, most prominently early-career practitioners. They produce an ongoing program of monthly online artist profiles, interviewing emerging Australian printmakers, as well as regularly curating group exhibitions and facilitating public programs and workshops. These opportunities foster a multigenerational and multidisciplinary peer-support network that centres artists’ wellbeing, congeniality, and professional development.