Nichole Lubcke: The Spaces Between

Presented as part of the South West Biennial 2026 satellite program at Arts Narrogin, this exhibition by Nichole Lubcke engages with labour, materiality, and feminine identity through ceramic and print-based works.

Lubcke is a multidisciplinary artist living and working on Wardandi Noongar Boodja.
Working across ceramics, textiles, and printmaking, her practice explores the vessel as a bodily form, using object, scale, repetition, and material to reflect on lived experience. Through hand-built porcelain, she employs slow, rhythmic processes of pinching, coiling, and surface marking that show the labour of hands. Pressure, restraint, and fracture remain visible, allowing the material to register labour as a trace on its surface.

Many of these works are produced in the small windows of time available between Lubcke’s roles as mother, teacher, and artist. While individual forms may appear slight, in number they speak to the accumulation of labour carried across daily responsibilities shared by many women.

The exhibition references Hold Me, Lubcke’s participatory installation of small porcelain vessels currently presented at Bunbury Regional Art Gallery as part of the South West Survey. In that work, visitors are invited to hold and handle the vessels, allowing the installation to shift through touch and shared interaction.

For this exhibition, Lubcke spends hours tracing the lines of her ceramic forms, carving their contours into print matrices, following each curve and retracing the vessel.
Installed in a continuous line around the perimeter of the gallery, the prints unfold as a timeline. Encountered sequentially, they reflect the time spent retracing each ceramic form, extending the artist’s gestures across the surface of the room.

Paired with a series of carefully coiled and folded ceramic pieces, the works speak to the physical engagement between artist and material, where etched lines, pinched clay, and delicate impressions show the persistent hand of the artist.

Aligned with the Biennial theme Tracework, the exhibition considers how labour, gesture, and attention leave their mark.

Exhibition Dates

11 April – 2 May

Gallery Hours

Tuesday – Thursday: 10am – 4pm
Friday & Saturday: 10am – 2pm

Official Opening

Saturday 11 April, 1 – 2pm
Arts Space Gallery, Arts Narrogin
Corner of Park & Fairway Street, Narrogin