Thresholds
Tamara Elkins and Abby Murray
16 October – 1 November 2025

Thresholds captures the evocative exchange woven through the works of Elkins and Murray. Elkins presents a moving image piece alongside a textile-based installation that traces gestures passed down through her matrilineal line, using embodied memory as a tool for introspection and personal narrative. Murray’s installations weave together fragments of knowledge about her grandmother—herself an artist—with remnants of her own artwork. Murray's work is grounded in the material culture of everyday life, where memory lingers and meaning accumulates.

“Even if we as individuals are cut off from any communal belief system or any collective work system, something seems to flow back to us through these places – which we see perhaps as symbols of lost symbols, apprehended but not specifically comprehended in our own socioreligious context.

- Lucy R. Lippard, “Introduction,” in Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (Pantheon Books, 1983), 39.

Curated by Monika Cvitanović

Schmick Contemporary acknowledges the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation upon whose unceded lands we live and work.
We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging.

Level 2, 706 George St, Chinatown

schmick contemporary