Mutual support, community and inspiration undergirds this group exhibition – times where each artist has worked together informally, as employment or mentorship.
Opening Event: 3 July 2025
Exhibition Open: 4 July – 14 September 2025
Peer traces a chain of formal and informal inheritances between artists from different generations . The exhibition draws out the coincidental exchanges of themes, materials and ritual that each artist carries through into their work. A sense of historical continuity, albeit partial and inconsistent, offers a contextual narrative of mutual support, community and inspiration. Peer questions how these artists coincide with one another, meet in unexpected places and arrive at a material and conceptual serendipity.
This exhibition aims to demonstrate how artists can have surprising and mutual influences across generations, shown in technical and stylistic inheritances. While also allowing each respective practice to be shared, we aim to draw out the experiences of support and exchange that have intermittently occurred between the artists.
Teelah George was born in 1984, Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia and lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia) her practice incorporates painting, drawing, printmaking and installation. Drawing on historical records and visual art, George has an ongoing interest in material culture, using found materials, as well as collections and archives as a point of departure in her practice. Her painting and textile practice responds to glitches and slippages in the documentation and recounting of history and memory.
Natsumi de Dianous (b 1997) is an artist based in Tokyo. Drawing from Japanese spiritual philosophies, Natsumi sees objects as possessing a life of their own after their making. To her, an art object can stand as independent and autonomous, something that finds its own trajectory in the world. Working across a range of mediums spanning painting, drawing, metalwork and textile processes, Natsumi’s work embeds layered patterns and shapes to create spaces for imaginative narratives. She is deeply fascinated by the potential for objects to be imbued with their own living essences and the techniques – particularly ones involving an investment of time, repetition and care – that can bring about this circumstance. Natsumi has a desire to capture a slippery fluid space where forms and ideas have the potential to appear through the process of accumulation; building up layers of paint and adornment to reveal and conceal.
Born in New Zealand in 1970, Richard Lewer has lived and worked in Melbourne since 1996. He is a painter, draughtsman, printmaker, sculptor and video artist, whose work presents an unsparing vision of the human condition. Lewer is interested in the stories of other people – those he has encountered in his own life or observed from a distance, including the past. He is never afraid of grappling with difficult subjects or the darker side of life. His work is uncompromising in its expression of human extremes and deeply personal, presenting his subjects with empathy and without judgement.
Header Image: Richard Lewer, Ute, Charcoal and Australia flag on wall, 5m x 2.4m.
