Britt Salt & Shannon Slee

Me and the Girls Don’t Want to be Boxed

June 6th – 28th, 2025

Me and the Girls Don’t Want to be Boxed takes its name from a song by Melbourne punk band Amyl and the Sniffers. To be “boxed” is to be concealed, categorised or controlled by a structure. For this exhibition, Britt Salt and Shannon Slee explore frameworks that, unlike a box, have the ability to bend. Frameworks such as time, consciousness and abstraction can become warped in processes based in textile design and craft, particularly weaving. Woven textiles are simultaneously a formal construction of interconnecting vertical and horizontal threads, as well as a flexible material that yields to gravity and the surfaces they come into contact with. The pliable yet structured nature of weaving makes it the perfect conduit for exploring how frameworks that order our experience of the world, can diverge from the expected and even lead us into the unknown.

Slee’s suite of new woven works push against the explicit regimes and systems of craft to consider the intangible and the abstract. Her labour-intensive weavings seek to capture the fleeting moments between sleep and waking up, when dreams linger, and impressions of simple geometric forms appear to the artist. Salt’s minimal artworks are an expression of obsessive-compulsive frameworks the artist imposes on herself, seeking ways to diverge from control by creating imagined architectures and scenarios where human slippage is inevitable. As Salt and Slee’s works in this exhibition press against the temporal, psychological and abstract frameworks of their daily experiences, textile thinking moves with them. A malleable approach to the world that facilitates evolution beyond perceived limitations and structures, into abstract worlds of possibility.