Launch: Wednesday 15th April

The River is a Mirror brings together sculptural, installation and performative works that engage with landscape through process and material experimentation. Drawing on unconventional materials and methods, the artists embrace spontaneity as a compositional force, allowing nature to participate in the making. The works in this exhibition trace the interrelations between bodies, materials and ecological histories, asking how we perceive, represent and are transformed by the natural world.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Danni Pleming
Danni Pleming is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist studying at RMIT, specialising in sculpture and installation. Their practice investigates cultural identity and shifting senses of belonging through close observation of ecological structures and natural phenomena. Drawing from organic forms, material
behaviours, and processes of growth and decay, Danni’s work reflects on the emotional and psychological dimensions of place and the environmental systems that shape us.

Leo Bagus Purnomo
Leo Bagus Purnomo is a Naarm/Melbourne–based artist and researcher, born in
Central Java, Indonesia. Working across multiple mediums — including painting,
performance, and Lukisan — his practice examines epistemic structures and the ways they shape our understanding of ourselves and the world. Leo holds an MFA from VCA and is currently a PhD candidate at MADA, exploring how alternative
epistemic frameworks present in animism, mysticism, and the occult can be
mobilised within contemporary art.

Mandeep Singh
Mandeep Singh is a South Asian artist living, learning and working on unceded Wurundjeri land. Employing experimental photography and sculpture to explore themes of cultural and personal memory, Singh’s practice allows her to relearn her Sikh identity from a diasporic positionality. A major interest for Mandeep is collaboration, letting go of ego and allowing art to be made by multiple hands. This can elevate work and create a space for artists and materials to speak with one another. Singh reinvents the past and present through diverse materials, often working with natural and found objects.

Parminder Kaur Bhandal
Parminder Kaur Bhandal is a Punjabi-born artist, poet, and librarian living and working on Wurundjeri Country. She is currently finishing her Bachelor of Fine Arts at RMIT University, where she has developed a multidisciplinary practice spanning photography, video, poetry, installation, performance, and wearable art. Rooted in her Punjabi-Sikh heritage and informed by feminine mysticism, Bhandal’s practice explores the relationship between body, land, memory, and devotion. Through the adornment of bodies with flowers, leaves, and natural materials, she reclaims creation as an act of resistance, transforming the body into a site of ritual, regeneration, and quiet power. Drawing on ancestral philosophies such as the Yoga Sutras, her work positions the body as a living altar and a vessel for spiritual and cultural continuity.

Peta Duncan
Peta Duncan (Meriam) is a self-taught, emerging lens-based artist exploring alternative image-making processes. Her work is both an exploration of her identity and a love letter to her culture and community. Through Peta’s work, she intertwines and lays bare complex familial relationships and the juxtapositions of embedding cultural practice in different contemporary photographic mediums and approaches.

Spiraro
Indy Heath (Spiraro) is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist working across textiles, sculpture, biomaterials, and lighting. Their work explores the material life of textiles, both living and lived, through a heightened sensory experience. Heath’s approach to making is rooted in sensory engagement, creating works that invite touch, sight, smell, and sound as ways to connect. They work with natural pigments derived from rust and plant matter, biomaterials such as seaweed and bacterial leather, metal, found objects, and discarded textiles, interweaving these elements into sculptural pieces that question how future materials might coexist with those of the past. Blurring the line between organic and human-made, their work sits in the tension between what is grown and what is discarded.

Sommer Dew

Charlie Poustie

Image: Poster by Sommer Dew