Exhibition Invitation

Redlands Art Gallery, Cleveland, Qld
Sunday 4 February – Tuesday 26 March 2024

Opening night Friday 2nd of February 2024 6:00pm

Across photography, sculpture and installation, Christina Lowry’s visually striking work confronts the conflicted relationship between humans and the natural world: a relationship that wavers between preservation and destruction, between care and carelessness.

“Taking the Latin phrase Rara Avis (rare bird) literally, Lowry’s work presents the viewer with images of birds that are under threat of extinction. These birds are set against elaborately staged and meticulously assembled scenes, which draw on archival research and collaboration with museums alongside practical skills in taxidermy and Lowry’s evolving collection of antiques and curios. The detailed and lush images that emerge from this process are both captivating and disquieting, blurring the line between the living and the dead, the domesticated and the wild. Combining references to seventeenth century Dutch still life painting and the tradition of the Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, alongside twenty-first century techniques, including digital photography and 3D scanning, Rara Avis examines ways that humans have sought to define and categorise nature, transforming life into specimen.

Lowry’s work brings together technologies of preservation, classification and documentation that range across centuries, to ask, how do we hold on to what we have lost? Capturing the wonder and beauty of both wildlife and human attempts to understand this, Rara Avis further asks, can we bear to lose more?”

Kyle Weise
Curatorial Officer
Redland Art Gallery