Sydney: lines of memory

Christian Bonett, Ursula Burgoyne, Somchai Charoen, Vicki Grima, Jan Howlin, Hendrik Kolenberg, Jenny Orchard, Sassy Park, Anna Parsons, Arun Sharma, Toni Warburton, Suh Yongsun

Gallery LNL is pleased to present Sydney: lines of memory, on view from 18 July through 16 August, 2025. This group exhibition brings together artists working across ceramics, drawing, and painting whose practices trace the material and psychological contours of contemporary Sydney. 

What does Sydney evoke in those who move through it- whether by birthright, migration, or in passing? 

For artists such as Vicki Grima and Toni Warburton, the city's architectural silhouettes, harbour lines, and streetscapes are repositories of formative memories, longing, and identity- intimate imprints of lives lived. For others, including Somchai Charoen and Arun Sharma, whose experiences of Sydney came as (relatively) recent arrivals, these same contours evoke aspirations and new beginnings- dreams that continue to shape a city founded upon the ideals of immigration. 

Elsewhere, the works of Suh Yongsun present an incisive outsider's perspective. Created during his residency at a former psychiatric hospital at the University of Sydney, his expressive and psychologically charged paintings refract Sydney's urban textures through the prism of cultural distance, offering fresh insights into the city's inherent tensions and contradictions that are often difficult to perceive from within. 

Together, these perspectives form a layered and multifaceted portrait of Sydney- one that reflects the perceptions of both its inhabitants and outsiders, while simultaneously shaping the city's evolving identity.

Suh Yongsun

Suh's expressive and psychologically charged paintings refract Sydney's urban textures through the prism of cultural distance, offering fresh insights into the city's inherent tensions and contradictions that are often difficult to perceive from within. 

Jan Howlin 

"Clay is my building material and my paint. I love it for its sculptural potential and its capacity to embody the ideas I like to invest in the making. It's a very physical experience working with clay, and often an exploratory one, because as the particular thoughts and issues that motivate me change, so do the techniques and processes involved.

I hope the works I make - despite their generally domestic scale and serious intent - might possess some stature, meaning, personality and sometimes humour. I would also hope that through some quiet power they can stand up and be seen, tell their stories, and make very human connections with people."

Hendrik Kolenberg

"The drama of light and shade has interested me for most of my working life…The glare, the haze, the milkiness of light, its effect is transformative, makes one aware of space, of aerial space, the cosmos."