Image: Carmen Alcedo, Poner el mundo boca abajo (detail), 2025, courtesy of the artist
March 27 - May 15, 2026
Opening event: Friday, March 27, 5:30-7:30pm
Gallery I, 154 Angas St, Kaurna Yarta
Free entry, all welcome
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You can find Toni’s exhibition 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’s entrance has a small step into the building. We have a ramp available, please ring the doorbell and our friendly team will assist you.
During gallery hours, our entrance will be unlocked. If the door is closed, please ring the doorbell to alert our team.
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.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.
We are excited to present The Sea is Talking, a new exhibition by Toni Hassan. In this exhibition Toni works across multiple modalities to honour the lives of the countless marine creatures that she has witnessed dead, or struggling, as the South Australian coastline has been affected by the harmful algal bloom. Daily walks along the metropolitan shoreline have revealed the incredible biodiversity of our local waters, sparking curiosity as well as sadness.
Through large scale coloured pencil drawings, video, and mixed media installation, Toni creates a feeling within the gallery akin to the emotional response she has had on the beach. We feel the physicality of the experience, the sense of awe is coupled with grief, the tide washes in and out sometimes stacked high with foam, othertimes revealing the last dance of a struggling eel. Toni ponders our current environmental realities, positioning the algal bloom as a barometer for our world in ecological crisis, she asks ‘how do we feel in our bodies having experienced a 35°c night?’ and ‘if the sea is talking, who is listening'.’
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Toni Hassan is an award-winning artist and writer. She is committed, in her multidisplinary practice, to being a witness to what’s within and around her - seeking to express interconnections and inspire care. In her drawing, painting, digital and installation work she investigates contemporary events, patterns of human relating and nature (including non-human centric perspectives).
This is Toni’s third solo show after graduating with First Class Honours from the School of Art and Design at the Australian National University in 2021. Her artwork is held in public and private collections. She is an author who has appeared on the ABC and in major Australian newspapers. Toni is an adjunct research scholar with Charles Sturt University and a founding member of the national Women's Climate Congress.
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These works respond to what I encountered on walks along the beaches of Adelaide’s Gulf of St Vincent in 2025. I felt the sea was talking. Countless marine creatures appeared, dead or struggling to stay alive, like secrets of the sea. Their appearance provoked both pathos and surprising awe and delight.
All life forms have intrinsic value, independent of their utility to us, and yet we are so deeply dependent on nature to thrive. Environmental events challenge us at many levels, as planet Earth talks. With the harmful algal bloom, I began to wonder, again, ‘What is mine to do?’ I was provoked to consider the role of ecological ethics that can be expressed through art. As Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman argue in their introduction to Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief (2017), it is vital to "disrupt the dominance of humans and expand the circle of the grievable beyond the human.”
Drawing with coloured pencil on paper allowed for a meditation on nature’s beauty and abundance, even as I hear nature’s groans and pains. In capturing and drawing marine creatures and landscapes, paying attention to contour and shape, colour and texture, a path opened up to move beyond disenchantment - towards pleasure and enchantment with the physical world that is undoubtedly under pressure. Found objects collected along the sea shore inspired other work that allowed for play: helped process my grief and create space for life to move forward.
This exhibition has support from