In the Quiet of the Land

Curatorial Statement - Japneet Kaur | Regional Arts Triennial – Iteration 3 ~ February 2026

In a time shaped by urgency, fragmentation, and burnout, In the Quiet of the Land invites artists and creative practitioners to explore reconnection - through slowness, through sensory awareness, and through embodied engagement with place.

Set against the powerful geography of Western Australia’s South West - its ancient coastlines, forests, granite formations, wetlands, and riverbeds, this exhibition turns toward the land as both subject and collaborator.

It asks: What happens when we let feelings guide us? When we listen through the body, not just the mind?

Rather than seeking to impose order or mastery, artists are encouraged to inhabit the thresholds of perception - to feel their way through sight, sound, touch, scent, and movement. Through grounded, process-led, and materially sensitive practices, participants are invited to contribute work that is emotionally resonant, ecologically attuned, and sensorially rich.

This curatorial framework builds on six thematic pillars:

1. The Senses as Compass
Sound, scent, texture, light, and movement become pathways into deeper understanding. Artists are invited to create works that evoke or awaken sensory memory - works that ground, soothe, disorient, or ignite.

2. Chaos and Care
Amidst ecological crisis and inner overwhelm, how do we make space for tenderness? Artists are invited to explore the dual forces of collapse and care, asking: How do we receive support—from others, from nature, from ancestors, from self?

3. Thresholds of Self
Between identity and disorientation lies emergence. This theme invites work that traces the inner journey - what it means to lose and find oneself in relationship to land, time, and community.

4. Balance and Belonging
In a region rich in cultural heritage and deep-time history, how do we (especially settlers) locate ourselves with respect and accountability? This pillar opens dialogue on kinship, colonial legacy, cultural knowledge, and the politics of place.

5. Regional Resonance
Artists are encouraged to draw upon the distinctive terrain and ecology of the South West - the salt haze of coastal mornings, the burnt bark of marri trees, the red dust of inland tracks. Let the land speak through material, form, and memory.

6. The Seen and the Felt
This exhibition privileges the quiet, the tactile, the emotionally immersive. Not just what can be observed, but what can be sensed, held, remembered, and moved through.

All Mediums Welcome

This is an open invitation to artists across all mediums. Painters, weavers, textile and installation artists, ceramicists, photographers, jewellers, sculptors, sound artists, scent designers, storytellers, and movement practitioners to respond in ways that are intuitive, poetic, raw, or refined.

Painting might translate the humidity of summer or the weight of grief into pigment.
Textiles may carry the texture of burnt bush, the rhythm of ocean tides, or stories embedded in thread.
Ceramics could respond to riverbeds or ochre earth, clay meeting Country.
Photography may offer glimpses of stillness, disarray, regeneration.
Jewellery might connect to the mineral memory of the place.
Sound and olfactory artists may craft immersive landscapes of scent and echo.

This exhibition is a space for experimentation and slowness; an invitation to deepen your relationship with land, and to let that dialogue be felt in your materials, gestures, and choices.

Exhibition Outcome

In the Quiet of the Land will culminate in a multi-sensory, emotionally immersive exhibition that honours both the land and the interior landscapes it evokes. Visitors will be invited to slow down, to notice, to feel—and to remember that transformation begins not in distant futures, but in present, felt connection.