Photo: Daniel Marks
Artist Talk
When: Friday, August 29, 5:30-6:30pm
Gallery I, 154 Angas St, Kaurna Yarta
Free entry, all welcome
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You can find In Reflection: In Response in The Mill’s Gallery I, located at 154 Angas St, Kaurna Yarta (Adelaide).
Gallery I is open Monday-Friday, 10am-4pm.
Accessibility
The Mill has two entrances, the main entrance on the corner of Angas and Gunson Street and an accessible entrance further down Angas Street.
Both doors are locked from the outside, there is a doorbell on the main door that will alert The Mill team. They will meet you at the accessible entrance to welcome you into the building.
The Mill has concrete flooring throughout with no internal steps and a disability toilet on site.
Read more in-depth information on our accessibility web page.
Join Stella Martino for a chat about In Reflection: In Response, presented during SALA Festival.
Stella will be chatting with artists Carman Skeehan, Shani Engelbrecht and Yana Lehey, talking about the inspiration behind the exhibition and their artistic process.
About the exhibition
In Reflection: In Response is a group exhibition curated by Stella Martino, featuring the work of five South Australian artists; Shani Engelbrecht (textiles), Tash Evele (textiles), Carman Skeehan (glass), Lotte Schwerdtfeger (ceramics) and Yana Lehey (sculpture). In Reflection: In Response has been developed through a collaborative, community-driven component led by Stella, who sites Ursula Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction in the conceptual underpinning of the exhibition.
For each of the artists, this exhibition has been an opportunity to come together, share ideas, collaborate, form communal bonds and develop their work. We’re excited to see the artists’ process, both in their individual practices and in creating collaborative work, showcased together in the gallery.
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Stella Martino is an emerging curator and writer originally from Dharug/Sydney, now based in Tarndanya/Adelaide. Stella completed her Master of Arts (in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art) from Aalto University in Finland in 2023. Since then, Stella has undertaken a curatorial internship at The Mill under the mentorship of visual arts curator Adele Sliuzas. While studying in Finland, Stella co-curated and was a participating artist in the group exhibition Ghost Elephant Stitches in the Snow and co-created and developed the community arts and recipe book Recipes for Resilience and Care in the Climate Emergency. Stella is interested in queer ecologies and how the more-than-human interacts with their environments and in art. Her master's thesis aimed to understand how various forms of memory inform storytelling and their impact on our well-being. Through her research and previous projects, Stella also explores the benefits of community care practices within and beyond art spaces.
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I put it here so I wouldn’t forget
I’ve always kept small things—gifts, fragments, found objects—on a little rack at home. It’s where I put pieces of the world that feel like mine: tiny markers of memory, small gestures of joy. For this exhibition, I’ve made a version of that rack in glass. Each object is a response—to the time shared, the conversations, the stitching, the slowness of sitting beside others and making something by hand. A clover. A safety pin. A necklace. Teeth. A bag. Candles, pencils, thread.
These are replicas of real things, made in glass, they feel a little removed from the world, but still intimate—fragile, exact, sometimes strange. They hold the trace of someone’s story, or a moment passed between us.
Ursula Le Guin reminds us that stories aren’t always linear or heroic—they can be soft vessels, carriers of collective experience. That idea stayed with me as we stitched and talked and shared time.
This shelf is both archive and offering. A way of holding memory that isn’t fixed, but refracted—through glass, through time, through others. In the making, I’ve come to know, understand, and appreciate the group I’ve worked alongside—through their stories, their hands, their quiet generosity. It’s a collection of small things that don’t belong to just me, gathered with care and left open to interpretation.
Carman Skeehan is a glass artist and maker, living in Adelaide, South Australia. Having completed the Jam Factory associate program in 2023, Carman has hit a milestone in her work, elevating her artistic practice. Guided by the meticulous creative process, Carman centres her work on the art of storytelling through glass, exploring the intersection of narrative and materials. Skeehan draws inspiration from early oil paintings and still lifes, creating a unique likeness in glass materials. Her work is an exploration of these elements, seamlessly blending them to create unique and compelling pieces of art.
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Dear diary, is a homage to the diary I received from my cousins during my first trip to Fiji in 2013. I was homesick and used it to comfort myself, writing that I would be okay and that I’d be home soon. Since then, I’ve returned to the diary at the end of each year to write a letter to my future self. While some years were missed, the ritual has continued for almost a decade. I reflect on the year, set goals, and often end with, “Good luck, future me!” The diary has become a vessel carrying my past selves and hopes for the future.
For this work, I recreated the diary cover using fabrics, sewing techniques and drawing to introduce softness and texture. I wove raffia along the edge to reference the handmade detailing of my original diary. I invited each artist in our group to write a letter to their future self and included my own past letters. I interpreted these letters into small fabric pieces, drawing from handwriting styles to create visual textures. A single thread connects all elements, symbolising a shared stream of consciousness linking our thoughts, hopes, and futures.
Shani Engelbrecht (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist of Indo-Fijian and Scottish-Irish heritage, creating and living on Kaurna Land, South Australia. She holds an Honours degree in Visual Arts (2022) and a Bachelor of Creative Arts (2021) from Flinders University. Her work predominantly explores her identity and sense of belonging in the space she grew up in. Race and identity are at the core of Engelbrecht’s practice as she interrogates the incidences of racism experienced by people of colour daily. By using performance, photography, video, drawing and painting, her work blends traditional and contemporary techniques to convey the duality of her upbringing and to reflect on the feelings of otherness. Engelbrecht has shown works in multiple exhibitions including Art That Walks OFF the Walls (Goodwood Theatre & Studios 2024), Hatched: National Graduate Show Exhibition (Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts 2023), not white/not brown (FELTspace 2023).
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As Above, So Below
Chews Wisely
Throughout my varied practice, the project has dictated the medium. Thus I have picked up a middling aptitude for various techniques, collecting skills like baubles. The ones I handled and polished the longest are those I have wanted or enjoyed since childhood.
This trend continues into my contribution to In Reflection: In Response. In the techniques employed and the stories shared, there is an odd tension between nostalgia and hope. The nostalgic anecdotes swapped within the group prompted me to choose floral motifs in my embroidery: common European plants which carpeted the meadows of my childhood, but struggle in the cracks here.
I explored Irish lace in an attempt to connect with a heritage of which I retain only a bastardised surname. The scale of my work lent itself to constructing wisdom teeth in response to the surprisingly common conversations about teeth in our midst. As we were encouraged to read Ursula LeGuin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, I came to think of the mouth as a carrier bag of stories. Five teeth, five stories; wisdom optional.
Yana Lehey is an environmentally motivated visual artist based on Kaurna land. Her practice spans various mediums, covering drawing, painting, and sculpture, depending on what a project calls for. Most recently, she has applied a textile approach to petroleum-based waste materials like plastic and rubber on a large scale, creating oversized crocheted sculptural works. She developed the necessary techniques as an accessible means for every person to tackle the waste problem without the need for expensive technology and infrastructure. Yana’s interest in environmental art first started to gain traction in 2020, with her first solo exhibition Face Up, featuring monumentally scaled watercolour portraits of nine young climate activists from diverse cultural backgrounds with diverse approaches. The research behind this project formed the basis for Yana’s current practice.
This exhibition has support from
