DRAW Space is delighted to present Group Show / RESIDUAL HISTORIES, opening at 6pm, Thursday 14 August 2025. The exhibition is curated by Annelies Jahn. Join the artists, curator and DRAW Space team to celebrate.
Annelies Jahn, Tara McIntosh, Aude Parichot, Izabela Pluta, Lisa Stack, Oliver Wagner
RESIDUAL HISTORIES – material agency, action and process
RESIDUAL HISTORIES is an attempt to describe the symbiotic relationship between maker and material, with process that enters us into vulnerable, provisional and almost accidental methods of making. Where the agency of material and time inexplicably brings about the ‘work’. These acts seem to hover in a space of pre-cognition – being seen and then accepted.
The artists of RESIDUAL HISTORIES, working through their own disciplines, commonly lean into this vulnerability, drawn to the provisional nature of making.
“Accept the provisional since the process can never stop.” – Lygia Clark
Click on the room sheet above to download a pdf copy.
Exhibition Essay
NEVER SEEN
by Lisa Pang
There’s a feeling that washes over (you may know it) on returning to a once familiar place after having been away for some time. The place may feel smaller, less imposing, more rounded, less crisp than your memory would have you believe. Expected details are aberrant, glitched, unexpected. It is an unsettling feeling, even alienating, for a homecoming, a sensation that has been described as jamais vu. As if during your absence, your familiar place accumulated agency. Your memory-as-residue settled like dust in the corners, among other unknown possibilities. For visual artists, the familiar place might be a set of routines by which they go about their work - favoured materials, known processes, a hummed melody. These familiarities set up a continuum of making, so the thing that is made – the artwork – once seen, is recognised as unfamiliar to its maker. Arriving at something once known but anew, and askew, is to be open to the unfamiliar and in a way, to look for the never seen.
In this way, Residual Histories is an exhibition defined less by exactness of intention and more by the vagaries of unintention; where marks and forms arise out of the fog of what-if, doubt, play, and experimentation. The works are drawn in a way that is somewhat tremulous, often playful, impetuous, with the precarity of mark-making hovering between design and accident. There is a provisional quality to them, as if they are suspended in a moment, and they may be, or may not be, finished works. This might be unsettling, but in a good way, sitting in that expansive gap between the sensory and the intellectual. Working with a sort of knowing unknowing is a way of uncovering the residual, visual, stories that move us.
Annelies Jahn, the curator of Residual Histories speaks of this exhibition holding aside a compelling space for those things that happen ‘to the side of what we think is the work’. She has assembled six artists, herself included, around the question, ‘how does placing the self into process deliver us into artmaking?’ There is a point at which process transforms materials into art, but for Jahn the far more interesting (and ambiguous) moment, as well as answering her question, is the one where process and materials reveal things that could easily have remained hidden, and the artist chooses to stop there. In terms of drawing, this is a moment of observation rather than of purpose, requiring a state of openness, and the designation of work as provisional. The materials, though known, are much more inconsequential to the process, as it is a disposition of curiosity in which the artist, almost as an estranged onlooker looks onto their own practice and work. Jamais vu may then best describe that sensation, as it goes beyond the optical, conceptual, planned, or known.
Picture Izabela Pluta, working away in her colour darkroom. It is a known setting, a confined space where she deliberately sets out to breach ‘safe-light’ rules, even turning it into a performative chamber as she engages bodily in what sounds like a symbiotic dance between herself and her hand-held laser-level, while her breath and hand movements sweep rhythmically - and injuriously – over the exposed papers. Pluta describes these almost-accidental moments in the dark as an inversion of process and the resultant errors productive; ‘because the damage is produced by the very light meant to protect the print, the work turns a precautionary device into a generative one. This inversion echoes my broader interest in ‘productive errors’: or moments when the apparatus reveals its own limitations and, in doing so, opens new perceptual space.’
The artworks by Aude Parichot are the re-assembled contents of a package sent to the curator, wrapped in tenderness of intention. The contents spill, a selection of material residues, fragments and drawings from the places Parichot has worked, an object catalogue of a series of drifting residencies over the past 2 years; places in Portugal, France, Australia. She describes how she works - in ‘process whispers’ – a phrasing evocative of the lightness and ephemerality of her practice. ‘Making is a way of connecting with the places I inhabit—through physical presence and creative attention.’ Her ‘process is body-led, between consolidation of methods and improvisation, rooted in attention and presence. Drawing holds a central role—not only as medium but as attitude—anchored in immediacy, awareness, and a durational unfolding.’
This might be the moment to consider how artists draw as an immediate and intuitive action made with residue, within and alongside other actions. Perhaps no other discipline, process, or medium (and drawing is all these things), is at such ease with speculative actions, ongoing doubt, even the possibility of failure. While painters have an abundant art historical tradition, including its own language, forms of critique and materiality to draw upon in contextualising their practices, here are some painters drawing with paint. Oliver Wagner describes his work as ‘experiments with labour, speculation and volatility to examine notions of skill, care and chance.’ Through an exacting process of application and removal of paint, brushing on and off, Wagner sublimates the body of paint into mere dust, creating marks and works that appear fleeting and formless, more characteristic of shifting vapours, gases, clouds. His response to these unexpected outcomes, contrary to imagination? He has ‘no choice but to accept them.’
And so, as one painter in the exhibition reduces paint to dust, another draws with residue. This then is painting slipping over to drawing, as the primacy of mark – or in this case, the absent touch of it, so suggestive of the slippage of memory. There, inserted between the formal vocabulary of plane, support and surface is drawing. Among the soft mantra of materials listed by Tara McIntosh is the enigmatic phrase ‘studio debris’ as ‘the works play with the threshold between human gesture and the studio environment.’ The quiet expanses in McIntosh’s work to take us to the edge of what is visual and remembered, often involving the use of unconventional tools (angle grinder) to rend marks as scars, the drawn remains of removing superfluous matter.
Residue as a disarming memento of the unintended culminate in the palimpsest patternation of Lisa Stack’s work. As told, ‘part of (the) process in the making of each printed garment is a cleaning and secondary process that creates large print-layered fabrics completed over many years – a residue of process, labour and time. The work shown bears witness to 30 years of work.’ Like an ocean bed, Stack’s silkscreened cotton piece is a fecund celebration - spiralling dots, fern-like tendrils, feathery corals washed in waves of gentle colouration, blending, mixing and continuously changing.
Annelies Jahn’s practice of making site-determined interventions has a productive side-effect. As these interventions are begun, even as they end, Jahn prolongs the moment of making so that it remains a continuous process. De-installation for her is as methodical a process as installation as she removes and collects, often re-assembling removed materials into new forms. Her terminology, ‘spatial artifacts’ captures how objects and residual materials can hold the memory of what was. A line once spread with angularity across a wall, mapping, measuring, now held in a curled form. Overspray captured as shadow marks. Marks that were once loud and prominent now held as fragments, quietly, votive tokens of their past.
It is the acceptance of a certain precarity of mark, inherent fallibility of process, and insertion of self into the work of artmaking that unite these artists, even as they hail from varied practices – painting, installation, multi-media, printmaking, photography. Curatorially, Jahn describes the group, rather poetically (and pictorially) as a selection of those leaning into vulnerability, drawn to the provisional nature of making. And so, they go on, not straight ahead, but leaning - into error, temporality, even absence. They return to the things, places, materials they know in order to do their work, but at a remove, seeking out alternate ways to chance upon and then to recognise, things as never seen.
© Lisa Pang 2025
Note: Italicised texts are extracts from artist statements and notes provided by the curator.
Click here to download Exhibition Essay as a pdf
Artist Biographies
Annelies Jahn
Annelies Jahn is a multi-disciplinary artist. Motivated by a desire to understand our relationship to place she uses processes of collecting, mapping and measurement to express the relationships discovered. Annelies’ work has been exhibited in Australia and overseas, with work in private collections and in the National Art School Archive. She has had residencies in Paris, Sydney and Regional NSW. Annelies holds a Master of Fine Arts and lectures at the National Art School. She acted as a director at ARIs, STACKS Projects Inc and ES74. She previously had a professional career in publishing and design.
instagram: @anneliesjahn
Tara McIntosh
Tara McIntosh is an artist that is interested in material as memory. Her work is developed in a studio-based research practice, where the canvas functions as a scaffold, the works play with the threshold between human gesture and the studio environment, Tara uses unconventional tools for mark making within her work, highlighting a rich history of action. Her practice is both labour-intensive and a thoughtful commentary on contemporary painting.
Tara holds a Master of Fine Arts (2023), winning the Lift Off Award from the National Art School upon graduating. Tara has been a selected finalist for the Mosman Art Prize, the Gosford Art Prize, and the Macquarie Art Prize. She has also been awarded the NSW Sydney Olympic Park Residency and more recently was awarded the Cité Internationale des arts Paris Residency 2025 (January to March) from the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
www.taramactintosh.com.au
Instagram: @taramcintosh
Tara McIntosh is represented by Syrup Contemporary, Sydney
https://www.syrupcontemporary.0com/tara-mcintosh
Aude Parichot
Aude Parichot is a French-born artist working between Australia and France, exploring the interplay between artistic process and life dynamics. Through process-driven projects, she questions our relationship to place, time, change, and language, connecting drawing, installation, and digital documentation. Many of her projects are inherently evolutive, unfolding as living systems that reflect the transformative nature of artistic practice. She navigates the space between her own agency, the environments she inhabits, and the materials she engages with—searching for a language where these elements converse in a poetic and open-ended dialogue. Her practice embraces multiplicity, permeability, and temporal/spatial dynamics. It is performative, experimental, and led by curiosity, play, and contingency.
At the heart of her work lies a desire to find the compelling beyond the rational—to defy predictable direction by attuning to the pull of space, gesture, and material. Her process is body-led, between consolidation of methods and improvisation, rooted in attention and presence. Drawing holds a central role—not only as medium but as attitude—anchored in immediacy, awareness, and a durational unfolding. Her practice seeks to unplay fixed narratives, making space for poetic possibility and imagining a more connected, transformative world. With a spirit as light and free as possible, her work proposes a kind of creative breath—a vision where art becomes a vehicle for shifting perception and reshaping lived experience.
Parichot holds a BFA (Painting, 2013) and MFA (Drawing, 2020) from the National Art School in Sydney, where she also lectured in the Drawing Department. Her work has been exhibited in Australia and Europe, including Articulate Project Space (Sydney), The Lock-Up (Newcastle), The National Centre for Drawing (Sydney), DrawInternational (France), PADA Studios (Portugal). She continues to expand her practice through international residencies and exhibitions.
instagram: @audeparichot
Izabela Pluta
Izabela Pluta was born in Warsaw, Poland, and migrated to Australia in 1987. She lives and works between the lands of the Awabakal and Worimi in Awabakal country (Newcastle, NSW) and the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal (Paddington, Sydney). Pluta completed her undergraduate studies in fine art at The University of Newcastle and her Master of Fine Art at The University of New South Wales. In 2017, she went on to complete her PhD in the Faculty of Creative Arts, The University of Wollongong, entitled Allegories of Diaspora: Gleaning the residues of spatial and temporal misalignments. Pluta lectures in photography at UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture in Sydney.
Izabela Pluta is an artist whose practice has developed a unique visual language of spatial and representational means to signal a different modality of vision. Her work explores the intersection of photography with concepts of time and memory, and questions of place. Conceptually anchored in the effects of globalisation and her own personal experience as a migrant to Australia, Pluta’s creative pursuit seeks to articulate a fluid mode of moving through and being in the world.
Pluta works across collage, film-based photography, sculpture, installation and video. Her poetic and multifaceted approach is characterised by processes of fragmentation, dislocation, reconfiguration and embodied fieldwork. These methods disrupt linear narratives of time- and record-keeping, and, in doing so, challenge historical uses of documents and images as authoritative devices. Pluta is attuned to the complexity of an image’s materiality, and she imbues other mediums with a kind of photographic thinking.
Pluta was awarded the Perimeter Small Book Prize which led to her debut artist book, Figures of Slippage and Oscillation, released by Perimeter in 2019. In the same year, Pluta was commissioned to create a significant new work, Apparent distance, by the Art Gallery of New South Wales for The National 2019: new Australian art: Apparent distance formed an undulating image plane across the AGNSW’s Entrance Court requiring viewers to navigate shifting terrain through the complexity of the photographic elements. In 2018 Pluta was the inaugural artist for the Marrgu Residency at Durrmu Arts Aboriginal Corporation in Peppimenarti. In the same year, Pluta presented new work at The Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; and in Form N-X00 at the US Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura, Venice, Italy (in collaboration with Other Architects). She has also been the recipient of various grants and awards including from The Australia Council for the Arts, The Qantas Foundation Encouragement of Australian Contemporary Art Award (2009), The Ian Potter Cultural Trust Grant (2008) and The Freedman Traveling Arts Scholarship (2007).
Pluta has held solo exhibitions at Artspace Ideas Platform, Sydney (2017), The Glasshouse Regional Gallery, Port Macquarie (2019); UTS Gallery, Sydney (2014); Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale (2012); Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne (2011); 24 HR Art, Darwin (2010) and The Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2009). Other notable group exhibitions include Civilization: the way we live now, The National Gallery of Victoria (2019); Watching the clouds pass the moon, MAC Lake Macquarie (2016); Timelapse, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale (2016); Through the lens, Horsham Regional Gallery (2014); and Foreplay, Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart (2012). Pluta has undertaken national residencies including at International Art Space (IASKA) Kellerberrin, as well as international residencies in Tokyo, Barcelona, Paris, Belfast and Beijing.
Pluta’s first European solo exhibition, Variable depth, shallow water, was staged in 2021 at Spazju Kreattiv, Malta’s National Centre for Creativity in Valetta. A selection of cyanotypes that comprise Blue spectrum and descent have been featured alongside an experimental text by Pluta in HØH JOURNAL’s inaugural issue, Disrupt - a new platform for contemporary art and literature that launched in 2020.
instagram: izabelapluta_studio
Izabela Pluta is represented by Gallery Sally Dan Cuthbert, Sydney
https://gallerysallydancuthbert.com/
(02) 9357 6606
Lisa Stack
Lisa Stack studied fine arts/printmaking at the VCA in the early 80’s. Lisa travelled to Japan for the first time in 1996 and has travelled there consistently over the years. Japanese culture has informed her practice and aesthetic – with their attention to nature, beauty and design in every aspect of life.
Lisa is known for her work making bespoke clothing - drawing, designing and printing runs of no more than 10 or 20 garments as limited editions. Part of her process in the making each printed garment is a cleaning and secondary process that creates large print-layered fabrics completed over many years – a residue of process, labour and time. The work shown bears witness to 30 years of work.
instagram: @lisahelix
Oliver Wagner
Oliver Wagner is a Swiss Australian Artist who lives and works on Gadigal Land/Sydney. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours 2015, and a Master of Fine Arts 2017 at The National Art School in Sydney. His work has been shown in local and international exhibitions in Sydney, New York, Tokyo and Paris, including the 2021 Tarra Warra Biennial, Healesville; the 2018 Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize at National Art School Gallery, Sydney; Rate of Change, 2018 at COMA, Sydney; the Subtle Art of Defiance, 2019 at Cross Art Projects, Sydney, as well as four solo exhibitions, 2019–23 at Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney. Wagner’s work is held in collections in Australia and Switzerland, including The National Art School Collection, Sydney, and Artbank Australia.
instagram: @_oliver_wagner_