WATER

Hands On Studio

7 February - 12 April 2026
Exhibition Opening: Friday 6 February 2026, 6pm
Artist Talk: Saturday 8 February, 2.30pm

Water operates simultaneously as material, infrastructure, and lived experience. It circulates through bodies and environments, enabling daily acts of washing, drinking, and immersion, while also being managed through systems of storage and control — dams, reservoirs, tanks, and domestic plumbing. Its presence is both immediate and mediated, shaped by cultural habits, ecological conditions, and technological frameworks.  

The artworks in this exhibition have been developed by artists from Hands On Studio, Canberra, whose practices foreground process, material engagement, and embodied ways of making. Through diverse approaches and mediums, the artists examine water as a mutable substance that exists across multiple states — liquid, solid, and vapour — and across varied registers of meaning. Rain, sea, ice, and tap water are considered not only for their physical properties, but for the social, political, and environmental contexts in which they are encountered. 

Situated within the expansive architecture of Canberra Contemporary, these works engage scale, temporality, and materiality to foreground water’s instability and persistence. Collectively, the exhibition invites critical reflection on water’s role within contemporary life, questioning assumptions of availability and permanence, while highlighting the interconnected relationships between human systems, creative practice, and natural cycles.

Chris Sleeman Taylor, Hands On Studio water show, 2025, posca, 420 x 594 mm.