Where Matter Breathes combines the practices of two Master of Visual Art and emerging artists from the Northern Rivers whose work explores the deep links between body, land, and spirit. Using sculptural forms, immersive installations, and transformative materials, Jenn Rowe and Jaimie Klum invite audiences into spaces where human experience and the natural world are closely connected. Working from uniquely different but complementary perspectives, Rowe and Klum explore how material, form, and environment shape identity, emotion and actions.
Rowe's art practice navigates the complex relationships between people, place, and the natural world. Through the reimagination of objects, plants, and animals, I explore the fragile balance between consumption and consequence, questioning how the ways we live shape the landscapes we inhabit. Embedded in my Trawlwoolway heritage, my work reflects on connection and responsibility, reimagining materials into quiet acts of care and renewal. Created through a carbon-neutral practice, my work invites contemplation and awareness – illuminating the intertwined forces of culture, ecology and humankind. In her sculptural works, native Australian animals and birds evolve into new beings – guardians
of a fragile future. Their forms shift and merge, adapting to survive as their habitats transform. Through material and myth, these creatures embody resilience, reimagining how life endures. Drawn from her Trawlwoolway heritage and a deep connection to Country, she sees these morphing beings as quiet acts of care and continuity – protectors and survivors. In their reshaped bodies lies a vision of protection and renewal, where nature, culture, and spirit entwine to safeguard what is yet to come.
“My artworks look to the living and spiritual entities of the land, sea and sky in pursuit of harmony and balance with our world”.
Klum’s interdisciplinary practice interrogates the shifting nature of the self through abstract sculpture and installation. Working intuitively with reclaimed industrial materials, sound, and projection, the work draws audiences into immersive sensory environments that engage with the unseen and unspoken landscapes of the human psyche. Through the unexpected pairings of industrial and everyday materials, the artists' create tensions between seduction and unease, humour and vulnerability. These works invite viewers to become voyeurs into their own internal landscapes, where memory, desire, and the unconscious quietly shape our ways of being in the world.
Jenn Rowe is a Trawlwoolway (Tasmania) artist of Anglo-Australian heritage, and creates works that are both contemplative and forward-looking. By combining natural and reclaimed materials with sustainable techniques, her works blur perceptual boundaries between the human and the non-human, the past, the present, and the future, as well as between the natural and the artificial. Jenn crafts sculptural artworks that reimagine and reflect nature amidst ecological upheaval. Her forms, which speak to nature and its animals, are rooted in a cultural connection to Country. She begins with what the land provides – driftwood, reeds, skeletal remains, feathers, shells, metal or gems, and upcycled industrial materials – and transforms them through sculptural and traditional making techniques. Her works highlight both the fragility and resilience of nature and ecosystems currently disrupted by urban expansion and environmental change. Functioning as thresholds between time, Jenn blurs the boundaries between natural and artificial, reflecting both the vulnerability and resilience of life in the Human Epoch.