Current Exhibition


Future Exhibitions

Accretions

Art Collective WA

November 1 - 30

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In Accretions, Penny Coss expands her practice across media, exploring the material agency of geological processes. New glass sculptures are shown alongside raw canvas paintings, revealing a shared logic of heat, gravity and self-organisation. Cast glass forms — including impressions of her geologist father’s tools — evoke fragility, strength and spectral transformation. Through layered pigments, earth materials and textile remnants, Coss reflects on the porous boundaries between matter, memory and self. 

Artist Statement

This exhibition presents an expanded body of work intersecting sculpture, painting, glass, and video.

Newly commissioned glass works will be presented for the first time alongside new textiles, raw canvas painting and works on paper. Reflecting an interest in geological material agency, the alchemic transformations of glass resonates uncannily with my painting processes . The extreme heat and gravity in casting glass resonate with the self organising processes in my painting. Where one single misstep in the mixing or the melting or the cooling processes of the pigments and silica can result in colour and texture shifts , the selected pigments in my paint coalesce and take their own pathway. Raw canvas buckles with the pour of wet paint and natural pigments and map their own course, negotiating the tensions of an uneven surface before settling into the valleys and contours.  

The indeterminacy of things, of matter itself is central to this body of work where the body is held suspended in the moment of making in the studio. It is then that I face the stranger within, the encounter with matter unsettles the illusion of separateness, making palpable the intra-active forces through which matter, memory, and subjectivity co-constitute one another. I think about the duality of glass, inherently fragile alongside its remarkable strength. Selected glass pieces in the exhibition are casts taken from my geologist father’s archives.  The geologist pic, once a robust steel functional instrument  takes on a new meaning through the inherent instability of its form leaving its ghostly trace. Silica sand, a key component in glass, a particulate with a deep cultural history highlighting the interconnectedness of geology and ancient industry. Sand, calcium carbonate and earth pigments are reconstituted in other works in the show alongside textile remnants of previous work .

Choosing a methodology of self organising material process, the space between self and other are not fixed but continually reconfigured through the way things emerge and intra-act. Nothing exists in isolation. Stratigraphic thinking is made material in my work: strata press against one another, sediments fold, faults rupture, and time refuses to remain linear. In these works, the stranger is not external but emerges as an echo within matter itself, an intra-active presence where memory, material, and self erode, compress, and crystallise together, reinforcing a feminist epistemology which proposes new ways of thinking about human and more than human relationality.

Penny Coss 2025


Past Exhibitions

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4th Australian Biennale of Reductive Arts (ABORA 4)
6 Sep 2025 – 28 Sep 2025

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It’s Already Happened, a Re-visioning 2025
5 Jan 2025 – 8 Feb 2025

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MASS group exhibition
18 Sep 2024 – 29 Sep 2024

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Matter group exhibition
9 Apr 2024 – 8 May 2024

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Stratigraphic Thinking Solo Exhibition
27 Feb 2024 – 9 Mar 2024

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Materiality group exhibition
23 Aug 2023 – 22 Sep 2023

Penny Coss, So Into You, 2022, Art Collective WA. Acorn Photo (10)
So Into You Solo Exhibition
17 Sep 2022 – 22 Oct 2022

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Material Language group exhibition
27 Apr 2022 – 22 May 2022

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In Deep (with Sylvia Griffin)
17 Nov 2021 – 30 Nov 2021

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Changing Patterns
21 Aug 2021 – 18 Sep 2021

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Twist of the Sea / UNDERCURRENTS19 / Fremantle Biennale
2 Nov 2019 – 24 Nov 2019

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PIECEMEAL ECOLOGIES:POSSIBILITIES FOR PATTERNING / AIRSPACE PROJECTS, SYDNEY
21 Jun 2019 – 8 Jul 2019

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BLACK AND BLUE / TENDER LANDSCAPES / THE LOBBY /PERTH
2019

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FROM SOMEPLACE ELSE / ART COLLECTIVE WA
18 Aug 2018 – 15 Sep 2018

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VISITANTS CLOSE ENCOUNTERS / FORM PORT HEDLAND WA
20 Oct 2017 – 16 Dec 2017

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Waterline / Hightide17 Fremantle Biennale
14 Nov 2017 – 28 Nov 2017

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all matter has a past.. VERGE GALLERY / UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
4 Aug 2017 – 26 Aug 2017
Penny Coss (Perth) Sean O’Connell (Sydney) Clare Peake (Broome)

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SHIPS THAT PASS / PS CONTEMPORARY ART SPACE / FREMANTLE
17 Mar 2017 – 7 Apr 2017

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EPIC NARRATIVES / PICA SALON / PERTH INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART
4 Jul 2015 – 16 Aug 2015

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Tectonic Effect Spot81 Gallery, Sydney
30 Jul 2014 – 24 Aug 2014

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Hortus Art Collective WA, Perth WA
5 Jun 2014 – 28 Jun 2014

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Landscape Stains, ArtStage, Singapore
16 Jan 2014 – 19 Jan 2014

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Wetlands
12 Aug 2009 – 19 Sep 2009

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Inversion of a Flat Lake
12 Apr 2007 – 6 May 2007