Indoor Gardens

Kathy Temin’s sculptures are over the performance anxiety. They’re feeling much better now. More positive about their position in the world and, generally speaking, more confident. The ‘problems’ with which they were beset back in the early days have been resolved and these mammalian objects are now blessed with robust good physical and mental health. More than this, their successes have so much multiplied that the once-ugly-duckling-hopeless-cases have upped the glamour quotient and gone on to achieve monumental celebrity status.

But even stars need looking after. Nurturing. A place to retire to away from the pressures of performance where personality can turn inwards. One is not possible without the other. So Temin creates cosy nooks for her show ponies to burrow in to. Comfort zones with a modicum of luxury where home-bodies are cottonwooled from the world. There the animal qualities show themselves. Abstract protuberances become soft cheeks, bosomy trees. Minimalism becomes sentimentalism. Botanical soft furnishings. Leaving us fans in awe of masterful harnessing of form and material in creation of tender life.

—Amanda Rowell

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Since 1989 Kathy Temin has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally. An exhibition of Temin’s work of the past five years was recently held at Victoria College of the Arts Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne as part of the completion of the artist’s PhD candidature. In 2006, she was included in a major exhibition of Australian and New Zealand contemporary art, High Tide, at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw and the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania. In 2005, she was selected for the group exhibition New05 at ACCA in Melbourne (curated by Max Delany). In 2001, her major installation work, My Kylie Collection, was included in the exhibition Art/Music at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (curated by Sue Cramer). Her work is held by most major public collections in Australia. She was the recipient of an Australia Council residency at PS1 in New York in 1997 and, in 1999, won the prestigious Moët and Chandon Art Fellowship. Temin exhibited regularly at the influential artist-run gallery, Store 5 in Melbourne, in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Her work is held in most major public collections in Australia, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand. Indoor Gardens will be Kathy Temin’s sixth solo exhibition with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.