Amber Cronin - Round One 2025 SUPPORT IMAGES

Ian Potter Cultural Trust: ISSP Residency 2025

1. Against the Rush of the Arrow, 2024. Art Gallery South Australia
Brass, recycled textiles, thread, embroidery floss, bronze, cotton.
Concerned with the inevitability of collapse, Amber’s sculptures are conceived as a set of tools to better navigate this epoch of great upheaval. They are artefacts that serve to prepare us for the end life as we know it. Against the rush of the arrow is a set of contemplative, melancholic works that emerge from a need to make sense of an uncertain world. Akin to the historical complexity of textiles themselves, objects and embroideries are laced with symbolism. The use of fabric, thread and wrapping as a means of repair weaves together a lineage of solidarity, shared knowledge and labour that spans from ancient times through the present and into tomorrow. The development of this new work, ‘Against the Rush of the Arrow’ was funded by Helpmann Academy and Arts South Australia for Radical Textiles, commissioned by Art Gallery of South Australia 2024/2025

2. Against the Rush of the Arrow, 2024. Art Gallery South Australia
Brass, recycled textiles, thread, embroidery floss, bronze, cotton.
Concerned with the inevitability of collapse, Amber’s sculptures are conceived as a set of tools to better navigate this epoch of great upheaval. They are artefacts that serve to prepare us for the end life as we know it. Against the rush of the arrow is a set of contemplative, melancholic works that emerge from a need to make sense of an uncertain world. Akin to the historical complexity of textiles themselves, objects and embroideries are laced with symbolism. The use of fabric, thread and wrapping as a means of repair weaves together a lineage of solidarity, shared knowledge and labour that spans from ancient times through the present and into tomorrow. The development of this new work, ‘Against the Rush of the Arrow’ was funded by Helpmann Academy and Arts South Australia for Radical Textiles, commissioned by Art Gallery of South Australia 2024/2025

3. Walking the Language of Landscape, 2024 Public Artwork: Hutt Road, SA
Brass, steel, archival text.
The font utilised in the artwork has been developed from archival excerpts and records from the first missionary schools at Piltawodli, literally returning these words, letters and knowledge to the landscape. These letters serve as an embodied sense of journey through the space, creating an interactive and immersive exploration for pedestrians that is rooted deeply in the history of this place. The distributed letters draw a response from (and to) Country, integrating references to the natural landscape as generative relational components.
Language is the heart of culture. It holds the thoughts and ways of seeing the world. Working in partnership with Kaurna Linguist, Jack Buckskin, Walking the Language of Landscape is series of integrated text interventions that publicly celebrate Kaurna language. Speaking language is beyond recall, beyond words. It holds clues about how to read the land, the soil, the trees – to engage in an animacy with the landscape.

4. Air Moves Earth (A Song For Sheoaks), 2021.

Sound Installation and sound work, 5minutes and 51 seconds. Created by Amber Cronin. Performed by Emma Borgas. Recorded by Kaurna Cronin

The inside of a grove of casuarinas whispers; it's like standing surrounded by aeolian harps. (Fraser, 2015)

To the north of Sauerbier House, there is a grove of Casuarina trees, also known as Sheokes. Amber invites careful looking and listening, for if you take the time, you will find a family of magpies living there within the soft ground covering nettles and hear the trees whisper to the wind. Amber has collaborated with the vocalist Emma Borgas to create the sound piece Air Moves Earth (a song for Sheoaks). Their ethereal song, inspired by travelling folk melodies, references the migration of the humans, animals and vegetation through the perspective of the trees. The song invites a communion with the grove, to listen and deeply engage in a deep exchange of intimate knowledge so we may better understand each other.

5. And it Called to Me, 2021. Praxis Arts Space, SA
Borrowed Objects, archival images, paint,
*You take an object from your pocket and put it down in front of you and you start. You begin to tell a story.” - Edmund De Waal (The Hare with the Amber Eyes)*
*Beyond Measure* builds off research and residencies of the Centre for Research Excellence in Frailty and Healthy Ageing to explore beliefs, experiences and misconceptions about frailty and ageing and to provide alternative conceptualizations to these perspectives.
As part of this research, Amber Cronin made weekly visits as artist in residence to Southern Cross Care West Beach across six months. As relationships with residents developed, she became particularly interested in their collections of objects and the specific memories that these keepsakes triggered. Through her time in residence Amber has been intrigued by the theory that objects and people co-construct each other. Cronin believes just as people exert an influence on objects, so do objects exert an influence on people’s thoughts, actions and memories.
In Things Beyond Measure Cronin introduces a body of work that reframes objects as mediators– a conduit between us and the world. Her anthology of images and artefacts examine the value we place on the things we collect through a lifetime, drawing from archival images to illustrate the stories from the community conversations as installation.
Full Exhibition Essay by Ash Tower available here.

6. And it Called to Me, 2021. Praxis Arts Space, SA
Borrowed Objects, archival images, paint,
*You take an object from your pocket and put it down in front of you and you start. You begin to tell a story.” - Edmund De Waal (The Hare with the Amber Eyes)*
*Beyond Measure* builds off research and residencies of the Centre for Research Excellence in Frailty and Healthy Ageing to explore beliefs, experiences and misconceptions about frailty and ageing and to provide alternative conceptualizations to these perspectives.
As part of this research, Amber Cronin made weekly visits as artist in residence to Southern Cross Care West Beach across six months. As relationships with residents developed, she became particularly interested in their collections of objects and the specific memories that these keepsakes triggered. Through her time in residence Amber has been intrigued by the theory that objects and people co-construct each other. Cronin believes just as people exert an influence on objects, so do objects exert an influence on people’s thoughts, actions and memories.
In Things Beyond Measure Cronin introduces a body of work that reframes objects as mediators– a conduit between us and the world. Her anthology of images and artefacts examine the value we place on the things we collect through a lifetime, drawing from archival images to illustrate the stories from the community conversations as installation.
Full Exhibition Essay by Ash Tower available here.

7. Islands of Coherence, 2023, Central Gallery, SA
Calico cotton, steel fixings, timber, cotton twill, aluminium, powder coat.
Group Exhibition Open Book featured all new work from South Australian artists Amber Cronin, Loren Orsillo and Kelly Reynolds. Open Book took inspiration from artist’s studio journals and considers their active and reflexive relationship to contemporary artistic practice. This exhibition features embroidered textiles, ceramics, paper assemblage and site-specific installation. Open Book was co-curated by Adelaide Central School of Art graduate Nicole Clift and Adelaide Central Gallery Curator Andrew Purvis.

8. Islands of Coherence, 2023, Central Gallery, SA
Calico cotton, steel fixings, timber, cotton twill, aluminium, powder coat.
Group Exhibition Open Book featured all new work from South Australian artists Amber Cronin, Loren Orsillo and Kelly Reynolds. Open Book took inspiration from artist’s studio journals and considers their active and reflexive relationship to contemporary artistic practice. This exhibition features embroidered textiles, ceramics, paper assemblage and site-specific installation. Open Book was co-curated by Adelaide Central School of Art graduate Nicole Clift and Adelaide Central Gallery Curator Andrew Purvis.

9. In Preservation I Walk, 2021, Not Fair Art Fair, VIC (detail)
Timber, siltstone, sandstone, quartz, plant matter, soil, porcelain, cotton, hand-dyed embroidery floss.
2020 UNISA HONOURS GRADUATE SHOW
2021 HELPMANN ACADEMY GRADUATE SHOW
2021 NotFiar Art Fair
Sitting between human and plant realms these curiously speculative objects seek to bridge our relationship with the living world, retracing dormant lines of meaning that pass through us and into things larger than ourselves. They signal a remembrance of a sacred path of connection. *In preservation I walk* finds its genesis in the oscillation between global phenomenon, localised experience and memories of the natural world.

10. In Preservation I Walk, 2021, Not Fair Art Fair, VIC (detail)
Timber, siltstone, sandstone, quartz, plant matter, soil, porcelain, cotton, hand-dyed embroidery floss.
2020 UNISA HONOURS GRADUATE SHOW
2021 HELPMANN ACADEMY GRADUATE SHOW
2021 NotFiar Art Fair
Sitting between human and plant realms these curiously speculative objects seek to bridge our relationship with the living world, retracing dormant lines of meaning that pass through us and into things larger than ourselves. They signal a remembrance of a sacred path of connection. *In preservation I walk* finds its genesis in the oscillation between global phenomenon, localised experience and memories of the natural world.

11. Ark, 2020. The Mill, SA
SCULPTURE AND INSTALLATION. THE MILL ADELAIDE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA 2020
*Ark* gently acknowledges overlooked, discarded things that sit between human and plant realms. As sculptural metaphors these vessels were conceived to carry these markers of relationship, remembering what is sacred in this interrelationship.
Developed through a vocabulary of processes, forms emerge that reframe everyday actions as sites of ritual activity. Utilising elements of ceramics, textiles, performance, moulding and casting, Cronin’s studio experiments are gathered and displayed in combinations that facilitate mediations on connection and discovery. These sculptural objects are arranged together in a speculative narrative reimagining the way that we live with our own fragility and doubt by exploring the threads connecting ecology and art making.
Cronin’s work considers a sculptural art practice as deep, ecological listening as the basis for better understanding our place in the world.

12. Room for the Hunter, 2020.The Mill, SA
2019 UNISA GRADUATE SHOW AND HELPMANN ACADEMY GRADUATE SHOW 2020
Conceived as an architecture or universe in itself, *Room for the Hunter* is a collection of objects that centres around the idea of digging. Deleuze and Guattari claim “…the first architectural gesture is acted about the earth, it is our grave or foundation.” The gesture captured is an excavation, an emptiness repeatedly dug and suspended in these forms. The flat surface of each block creates a plane which can be transformed into a wall, a floor, a structure, a pattern. The story of becoming, of the first action, breaks the surface of each.
The entire body of work expands out from this action as the core motif. Linked to archaeology, the process involves the casting of a hand-dug void. The resulting positive form provides an identical displacement when the concrete form is poured. Each block has within it, a unique cast of an action.

13. Dictionary of Animism, 2022, Floating Goose SA.
Concrete, dental plaster, soil, plant matter.
SOLO EXHIBITION, INSTALLATION : STOCKROOM VIC, FEBRUARY 2022 + FLOATING GOOSE SA, MAY 2022
CREATIVE ESSAY BY LARA MERRINGTON
*Dictionary of Animism* is a vocabulary of text-based sculptural objects that investigate the way that meaning extends beyond the rational and formal limits of language.

Grounded in an ongoing examination of hierarchies of knowledge that position language as foundational to meaning-making, Amber Cronin’s body of work looks to extend modes of representation as more widely distributed semiotic ecologies. Alluding to memories and experiences of more-than-human relationships, *Dictionary of Animism* is an anthology of contemplatively playful works that emerge out of lost purpose and lost meanings; a call to reflect on our relationship with the living world and the dormant lines of meaning that flow around us.
This project was supported by The Helpmann Academy’s Creative Development Grant Program.
*An absence of language is far from an absence of meaning.*

14. Dictionary of Animism, 2022, Floating Goose SA.
Timber, concrete, pewter, steel, bronze, brass, plant matter, river stone, plaster, paper, archival ink, cotton.
SOLO EXHIBITION, INSTALLATION : STOCKROOM VIC, FEBRUARY 2022 + FLOATING GOOSE SA, MAY 2022
CREATIVE ESSAY BY LARA MERRINGTON
*Dictionary of Animism* is a vocabulary of text-based sculptural objects that investigate the way that meaning extends beyond the rational and formal limits of language.

Grounded in an ongoing examination of hierarchies of knowledge that position language as foundational to meaning-making, Amber Cronin’s body of work looks to extend modes of representation as more widely distributed semiotic ecologies. Alluding to memories and experiences of more-than-human relationships, *Dictionary of Animism* is an anthology of contemplatively playful works that emerge out of lost purpose and lost meanings; a call to reflect on our relationship with the living world and the dormant lines of meaning that flow around us.
This project was supported by The Helpmann Academy’s Creative Development Grant Program.
*An absence of language is far from an absence of meaning.*

15. Dictionary of Animism, 2022, Floating Goose SA.
SOLO EXHIBITION, INSTALLATION : STOCKROOM VIC, FEBRUARY 2022 + FLOATING GOOSE SA, MAY 2022
CREATIVE ESSAY BY LARA MERRINGTON
Timber, concrete, pewter, steel, bronze, brass, plant matter, river stone, plaster, paper, archival ink, cotton.
*Dictionary of Animism* is a vocabulary of text-based sculptural objects that investigate the way that meaning extends beyond the rational and formal limits of language.

Grounded in an ongoing examination of hierarchies of knowledge that position language as foundational to meaning-making, Amber Cronin’s body of work looks to extend modes of representation as more widely distributed semiotic ecologies. Alluding to memories and experiences of more-than-human relationships, *Dictionary of Animism* is an anthology of contemplatively playful works that emerge out of lost purpose and lost meanings; a call to reflect on our relationship with the living world and the dormant lines of meaning that flow around us.
This project was supported by The Helpmann Academy’s Creative Development Grant Program.
*An absence of language is far from an absence of meaning.*

16. Dictionary of Animism, 2022, Floating Goose SA.
SOLO EXHIBITION, INSTALLATION : STOCKROOM VIC, FEBRUARY 2022 + FLOATING GOOSE SA, MAY 2022
CREATIVE ESSAY BY LARA MERRINGTON
Timber, concrete, pewter, steel, bronze, brass, plant matter, river stone, plaster, paper, archival ink, cotton.
*Dictionary of Animism* is a vocabulary of text-based sculptural objects that investigate the way that meaning extends beyond the rational and formal limits of language.

Grounded in an ongoing examination of hierarchies of knowledge that position language as foundational to meaning-making, Amber Cronin’s body of work looks to extend modes of representation as more widely distributed semiotic ecologies. Alluding to memories and experiences of more-than-human relationships, *Dictionary of Animism* is an anthology of contemplatively playful works that emerge out of lost purpose and lost meanings; a call to reflect on our relationship with the living world and the dormant lines of meaning that flow around us.
This project was supported by The Helpmann Academy’s Creative Development Grant Program.
*An absence of language is far from an absence of meaning.*

17. Pleasance, 2024. Art Gallery SA.
Plants, soil, Plastic pots timber, fixings, synthetic fabric, acrylic paint, chairs.

Inspired by the meandering, tranquil flow of the nearby Karrawirra Parri (River Torrens), Pleasance is an immersive architectural folly conceived of as a collaboration between Fallow + Superbloom. Located in the courtyard sculpture garden of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Pleasance is a living artwork that extends from the marquee into a living artwork, where plants and sculptures frame intimate moments of connection. Designed using unexpected combinations of species, this plant-forward experience invites the viewer to pause and revel in a journey through a rich tactile field of colour, beauty and awe.

18. Tea House, 2022. The Adelaide Botanic Gardens SA.
Tea House, an interactive experience of nature,   ritual, and connection. Based inside a custom-designed space in the Australian Forest in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, the Tea House is an immersive performance of ritual and connection. This sensory artistic experiment invites you to reimagine everyday rituals through reflection on connection to nature and each other.
Tea itself is one of modern society’s last remaining daily practices. Imbibing these mixtures of fragrant leaves and petals is a powerful starting point for conversations on connection, presence, place, and nature. Our teas are crafted in partnership with local Aboriginal food company Warndu to provide an even closer relationship to this particular land and place.

19. Dawn Chorus, Single channel stereo recording, 10:20 minutes, 2022. Vocalist Emma Borgas. Mixed by Kaurna Cronin

Excerpt from commissioned essay by Andrew Purvis: Amber Cronin’s work, Dawn Chorus, is the result of a lengthy residency with the Mount Lofty Ranges Woodland Bird Monitoring Program. Beyond coming to grips with the data set, Amber visited the sites and spent time with the surveyors and volunteers, seeking to understand this community and connect with the source of their passion. A versatile artist working across a range of materials and processes, Amber recognised sound as a key element in this project. Working with vocalist Emma Borgas and composer Kaurna Cronin, Amber has created a complex and multi-layered soundscape that is plangent and affecting.

This work does not seek to improve on nature’s melodies but, rather, it recognises the way in which human culture has been shaped and influ- enced by birdsong. Birds weave like a bright thread through the tapestry of our poetry and song, our myths and legends, and our visual arts and crafts. Magpie-like, Amber’s soundscape is constructed from gleaned lines of poetry and musical motifs. As these elements coalesce, the work gener- ates a kind of liminal language, one that speaks across the separation of species.

This work does more than honor the birds; it also recognises the human communities they touch. Haunting and elegiac, Dawn Chorus gives shape to a sense of loss, while also paying tribute to the beauty of birdsong.