Kristy Hussey - Conclave: Cardinal II
Kristy Hussey - Conclave: Cardinal II
Kristy Hussey, Conclave: Cardinal II
Discarded objects (antique crystal lidded jar, 18K gold crucifix, ornate wooden vase), 49cm high, 11 x 11cm
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Kristy Hussey is a Naarm (Melbourne)-based assemblage artist best known for her unique stacks of hand-built ceramics and/or found objects. Kristy was a finalist in the 2024 Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, the 2023 Wyndham Art Prize and the 2021 National Emerging Art Prize. She sold out her 2022 solo exhibition at the CRAFT Victoria vitrine gallery. She has exhibited in Paris, Milan, Sydney, and Melbourne and sold her artworks to collectors internationally. She is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts.
As a child, I would press my face to the glass cabinet that housed my parent's wedding gifts — fragile heirlooms of crystal, silver, and porcelain. These were sacred objects in our home: dazzling and untouchable, part of my mother's curated domain. They were to be admired, not handled.
Today, I seek out similar objects in charity and antique shops — once-cherished domestic relics now discarded. Candlesticks, rosary beads, wine glasses, and ornate vessels: items that once played ceremonial roles in people's lives, now redundant and forgotten. Each bears the patina of memory — quiet evidence of their previous lives and rejections. For me, they are conduits for storytelling.
I collect and assemble these objects, stacking them into figurative totems, then transforming them further through fire, paint, flock, and other experimental finishes. I create chess pieces — playful, uncanny characters born from fragments of domestic life. The original objects become unrecognisable, stripped of their conventional function and meaning, now reborn into something mythic and curious.
This process is both joyful and subversive. On one level, it is the instinctive play of childhood and the fantasy of animating objects, giving them voice and agency. But it is also an act of rebellion: a defiance of domestic order, of the reverence that kept these things behind glass. Through this transformation, I reframe my own memories, challenging the rules I grew up with and reimagining the objects of my past as playful, empowered figures in an invented narrative.
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Artwork is available for collection or shipping after the closing date of the exhibition, August 17th 2025.
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