Where Matter Breathes brings together the practices of Northern Rivers artists Jenn Rowe and Jaimie Klum in an exhibition that explores the relationships between body, land, material, and spirit. Through sculpture, wall-based forms, photography, and installation, Rowe and Klum examine how inner and outer worlds are shaped through matter: through what is gathered, held, transformed, and made visible. Though working from distinct perspectives, both artists use material as a way to think through connection, fragility, adaptation, and survival.
Rowe’s practice is informed by her Trawlwoolway heritage and deep connection to Country. Working with driftwood, skeletal remains, feathers, reeds, shells, and reclaimed materials, she creates sculptural forms that reimagine animals, spirits, and ecological futures. Klum’s materially driven practice explores the shifting terrain of the self through abstract sculpture and photography. Using industrial plastics, she gives form to psychological, sensory, and bodily states that are often felt but difficult to name.
Together, Rowe and Klum create a dialogue between physical and psychological landscapes: between the living systems of Country and the internal terrains we carry within us. Rowe’s works emerge from processes of retrieval, care, and renewal, transforming what the land offers into beings that speak to resilience, continuity, and ecological interdependence. Klum’s works translate inner experience into material form, using synthetic and reclaimed materials to explore embodiment, concealment, vulnerability, and transformation.
Across the exhibition, matter becomes active and expressive. Inflated surfaces, padded fragments, translucent membranes, feathers, bones, and found materials act as thresholds between exposure and protection, disturbance and repair, presence and absence. Where Matter Breathes invites viewers to consider how bodies, environments, and psychic states are shaped through constant processes of change, and how material itself can hold memory, tension, and possibility.
Jaimie Klum is an emerging artist currently working on the lands of the Kulin Nation, specifically in the area now called Naarm (Melbourne). Jaimie graduated with a Master of Visual Arts from Queensland College of Art and Design, Griffith University, in 2025 and has worked as a practicing artist for three years following more than eight years of practice in interior design (Bachelor of Design from Billy Blue College in Sydney in 2014).
Her work explores the parts of human experience that resist language, internal states, emotional ambiguity, and the shifting, layered nature of the self. She works with abstract sculptural forms and sensory materials to evoke the instability of perception and the complexity of psychological transformation. Through these works, her aim is to create space for the quiet, invisible parts of being, things we feel but can’t always name.
Jenn Rowe is a Trawlwoolway (Tasmania) artist of Anglo-Australian heritage who creates works that are both contemplative and forward-looking. By combining natural and reclaimed materials with sustainable techniques, her works blur perceptual boundaries between the human and the non-human, the past, the present, and the future, as well as between the natural and the artificial. Jenn crafts sculptural artworks that reimagine and reflect nature amidst ecological upheaval. Her forms, which speak to nature and its animals, are rooted in a cultural connection to Country. She begins with what the land provides – driftwood, reeds, skeletal remains, feathers, shells, metal or gems, and upcycled industrial materials – and transforms them through sculptural and traditional making techniques. Her works highlight both the fragility and resilience of nature and ecosystems currently disrupted by urban expansion and environmental change. Functioning as thresholds between time, Jenn blurs the boundaries between natural and artificial, reflecting both the vulnerability and resilience of life in the Human Epoch.
www.jennrowe.com @jenn.kooroo.rowe