This exhibition is a cathartic meditation on the precarious reality of sustaining a creative life – quieting the Hungry Ghosts. Hungry ghosts, or pretas, are beings in Buddhist tradition tormented by an insatiable desire, hunger, or thirst due to unfulfilled longing. This collection of work by Cindy Durant and Niccy Pallant speaks to the tension between intention and survival. It creatively explores the emotional and physical toll of maintaining a creative practice.
Cindy juggles life off-the-grid in a remote and desolate coastal outpost. This body of work has been six years in the making as Niccy and Cindy first exhibited together in 2019 and have maintained a collegiate comradeship since. They will gather in the desert for a 'Hungry Ghost' residency in preparation for a considered and concentrated printmaking collaboration.
The repetition of this cycle of making work creates a rhythm of resilience, a pattern of persistence, a jaggered stamp of survival; despite the odds. Rendered in a stark black-and-white (and dashes of colour), the exhibition draws on printmaking traditions—lino, relief, screenprint, etching, and experimental processes such as solar plate and tetrapak. The aesthetic is bold, raw, and immediate, referencing coastal and desert culture and mythology. Marks are unapologetically hand-drawn, gestural, and insistent. Figures—women—stand at the centre of the work. They are assertive, grounded, and unflinching. Their voice is: commanding, familiar, and resolute. They occupy the edge—of systems, of sustainability, of recognition—and speak from that precipice. They stand strong within precarity.

The inner room of the exhibition, a tent-like structure, operates as an immersive space - a visit to the 'Visionary'—part refuge, part testing ground. The experience draws on the atmosphere of visiting a tarot reader: slightly unnerving, intimate, and charged with the possibility of glimpsing an unknown future. Participants are invited to move through a series of prompts and actions: drawing and sketching, simple printmaking and mark-making, selecting a card or “reading” that offers a provocation, directive, or imagined future. Visitors are asked to imagine themselves forward—into possibility, into risk, into an unstable but generative future. Emerging from the tent, participants carry with them a trace of the encounter: a print, a drawing, a chosen card and hopefully a shift in perception.