Held, Altered

Grace Mitchell, Indya Pearce and Keely Varmalis

26 May - 6 June 2026

Please Join us for the opening celebration Tuesday 26th May 6-8pm

Held, Altered brings together Grace Mitchell, Indya Pearce and Keely Varmalis to explore the body as a site and vessel. Across painting and glass, the exhibition considers how memory is carried, absorbed and transformed through material, and how forms of knowledge emerge through sensation, intuition and embodied experience.

Working across distinct practices, each artist approaches the body as something shifting and permeable, shaped through time, pressure and relation. Grace’s work engages with inherited memory using photographs from her mother, filtered by fog, wax and material decay. Erosion and quietness become ways of thinking through lineage, where memory lingers as imprint and atmosphere. Indya’s paintings move between figuration and abstraction, drawing on archetypal narratives to explore femininity, ritual and the cyclical nature of life. Fragments of bodies appear charged with emotion intersecting personal experience with collective forms of storytelling. Keely’s clustered glass installations abstract the body into vessels shaped by heat, breath, and movement. Responding to pressure, environment, and proximity, she uses fluidity as both language and methodology, drawing on water’s ability to continually shift, yield, and reform - adaptive, like identity.

Together, the works open a dialogue around bodies as sites that carry memory, feeling and history. Materials are treated as repositories of experience, creating a tension between containment and release, decay and repair, inviting a consideration of how the body remembers, and how knowledge persists as something felt.