Announcement:
The Guildhouse Collections Project – 60 Year Archive
Guildhouse is delighted to announce that artist Nat Penney has been selected as the recipient of The Guildhouse Collections Project – 60 Year Archive and will exhibit at Adelaide Town Hall for Adelaide Festival 2027.
Nat will engage with, and respond to, Guildhouse’s rich archive bringing a new perspective to six decades of artist-led activities and contemporary art histories.
Working alongside Nat Penney will be curator Susan Charlton, who brings extensive experience translating archival material for public exhibition.
The Guildhouse Collections Project – 60 Year Archive is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund with additional funding from City of Adelaide and Guildhouse.
The exhibition will premiere during Adelaide Festival and run from 19 February – 30 June 2027.
Nat Penney is an artist/fabricator who combines an obsession for labour intense metal fabrication and timberwork processes with found and formed objects. She takes a lot from her daily job fabricating for others, seeing the work and the art as completely intertwined, with both supporting each other through conversations and concentrated material engagement.
Her practice involves searching for pleasing points of interconnectedness between the unfamiliar and familiar, often resulting in playful sculptural assemblages with kinetic moments that offer an exchange of structured absurdity. She enjoys considering the subconscious impulses in objects and how we can feel decisive about their role and placement without there being an actual system to follow.
She often incorporates materials weighted heavily in nostalgia, such as tiles from her renovated childhood bathroom or her parents’ wooden tennis racquets, embedding personal histories into sculptural objects. These materials act as carriers of memory, yet memory and nostalgia themselves are malleable, untrustworthy, and sometimes irresponsible, reshaping perception and altering what we take to be truth. This uncertainty around truth is smoothed out within the somewhat absurdist moments she presents, as they engage in futile motion and maybe make you smirk.
Penney graduated from Adelaide College of the Arts with first-class honours in 2017 and received the FELTspace emerging artist award. Exhibitions include ‘Reflections of Home’, Rotterdam Design Biennale, NLD (2025); ‘a winter beach is a good place for seeing clearly’, Newmarch Gallery, SA (2024); ‘making beds inside post anchors’, Post Office Projects, SA (2024); ‘HEAVY// lite’, Praxis ARTSPACE, SA (2024) and ‘Limits and Leavings’, Bus Projects, VIC (2022). In 2018, Nat undertook residencies at Sanskriti Kendra Museums, India and George Street Studios, Australia. Nat was a 2023 JamFactory Furniture Associate and is co-director of fab workshop.
Susan Charlton is a writer, curator, artist, archivist, specialising in collaborations with artists on archival collections. She was Creative Producer at NSW State Archives & Records, from 2001-15, creating exhibitions, including [art meets archive] and In Living Memory exhibition of photographs from the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board with Mervyn Bishop. She curated the Museum of Love & Protest for the 40th anniversary of Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, Unity! Strength! Justice! for the 100th anniversary of NSW Teachers Federation, and This Woman is Not a Car: Margaret Dodd for The Cross Art Projects and ACE Gallery.
Since returning to Adelaide in 2019, she has been experimenting with text, found/gifted objects and installation, including the Artist Archivist Activist statement jewellery range and archive / fever / dreams exhibition of analog hand-cut collage, glass sculptural pieces and illuminations at FELTspace gallery. Susan was the 2020 ARTWORKS Writer in Residence presented by Guildhouse in partnership with the City of Adelaide, with text from the residency recently produced in zine form for Zinegeist at The Little Machine.
Images: Nat Penney, ‘tell me they’ll tell you she’s a man of steel‘, 2024, stainless steel, gripwell cambuckle tie downs, treadmill, castor wheels, 1500x3000x700mm (approx.), photo: Sam Roberts; Nat Penney, photo: Connor Patterson; Susan Charlton, photo:
