OPENING: 5:00 –7:00pm FRIDAY 21 AUGUST
Presented in collaboration with Ingrid Wilson from IMMI Contemporary, More Salt Please gathers work shaped, directly and indirectly, by life near the water.
Across photography, painting, moving image and sculpture, More Salt Please features works by Filippa Edghill, Sean Leonard, Nat McComas, Bri O’Connell, Cassandra Scott-Finn and Sam Steinhauer.
Originally developed to sit alongside the Byron Bay Surf Festival, the exhibition has drifted into a broader consideration of coastal life and the ways the ocean settles into everyday experience: in reflection, movement, memory, ritual, and the fine layer of salt left on everything.
BIOS
Sean Leonard is an emerging artist based on Bundjalung Country in the Byron Shire. He has painted since childhood and has a background in fashion, which continues to shape his attention to surface and composition. His mixed media paintings are built through instinctive mark-making and revision. They often carry the feeling of a diary page or private map, where repeated symbols suggest memory without explaining it directly. Leonard’s work sits between abstraction and drawing, with a restless visual language that is still unfolding. @seandavidjames
Nat McComas grew up on the east coast of NSW, spending high school lunch breaks in the darkroom, captivated by the magic of developing black-and-white film and prints by hand. That early fascination became the foundation of a career spanning more than two decades, during which Nat has freelanced to national and international clients and publications as a lifestyle, commercial, and documentary photographer.
Now based on Bundjalung Country in Northern NSW, Nat draws creative inspiration from the stunning region that surrounds her and holds a deep appreciation for the rhythms of nature and the simple pleasures of life. In her personal practice, McComas works exclusively with film and traditional darkroom printing — producing limited edition works that embrace the materiality, impermanence, and sensory depth that only an analogue process can yield.
"Her personal practice has returned her to the medium where it all began – working with film and traditional darkroom processes to create limited edition prints of quiet luminosity and irreducible physicality." @natmccomas
Cassandra Scott-Finn is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist based on Bundjalung Country (Byron Bay, Australia). Working across photography, sculpture, performance, installation, and analogue moving image, she explores biophilia, ecosexuality, climate consciousness, and the interdependence between people and place.
Highly Commended in Sculpture at Scenic World and a finalist in the Bowness Photographic Prize, National Photographic Portrait Prize, Olive Cotton Award, and Galah Regional Photography Prize, Scott-Finn has been commissioned by the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), with works held in public and private collections.
Influenced by ecological thought, contemplative practice, and the ecosexual movement, her work explores the relationships between body, landscape, perception, and belonging, inviting audiences to slow down and reconnect with the living world. “My practice is a conversation with the natural world ~ a sustained inquiry into its intricate connections that inform my material and conceptual language.” @soft_urge__
Sam Steinhauer's paintings are based on a personal archive of photographs which he has been cataloguing for the last 15 years. Drawing from his own photographs, memories are paired, painted, and repurposed to see what nonsense narratives might emerge. His work is interested in the elasticity of personal memory and the interplay of art and the everyday. He holds a first class honours degree in Art History from the University of Melbourne (2016). @streetshebowka