Solo exhibition, project8, Melbourne
(It is Necessary to) Learn to Swim was an exhibition that traced the porous boundary between memory, myth and the quiet dread of a world reshaping itself. The exhibition took its title from a boatbuilding text, folding together the legacy of a story long used to steady children, Noah’s Ark, with the psychological and physical projections we cast onto vessels of rescue. Sculptural offerings, cast monkey appendages, moving-image works and installation formed a constellation of gestures that drifted between the imagined and the material. A reading circle with macaques, a therapy-like exchange and the remnants of stories half-believed accumulated as quietly dissonant scenes.
Anchored by the central moving-image work, (It is Necessary to) Learn to Swim, the exhibition returned to the Ark not as a promise of salvation but as an ageing narrative buckling under contemporary pressure. An intimate voice threaded through childhood encounters with rescued animals, hospital rooms and a mirrored chamber teeming with creatures, revealed how tales meant to soothe can instead plant a soft, persistent dread. Preparation and impossibility sat uneasily together; the vessel is never quite large enough, never quite convincing. Across the exhibition, Valender asked what can we carry forward, what slips from our grasp and how we might learn to stay afloat when the stories we inherit can no longer hold us.
(It is Necessary to) Learn to Swim, 2026, mixed media installation including moving image, 6min26sec, on Le Corbusier replica chaise longue, Philippe Starck replica stool, books, faux fur rug and miniature replica of installation. Dimensions variable
(It is Necessary to) Learn to Swim the artwork is a moving-image installation that unfolds from a reclining position, the story situated on a replica Le Corbusier chaise longue amid books recovered from Lismore following the 2022 floods. The posture evokes both clinical rest and psychoanalytic encounter. Within the film, a therapy-like scene emerges in which the artist’s body is displaced by a digital screen, substituting physical presence with mediated projection. The exchange is intimate yet estranged; confession and consultation occur through technological proxy. The narrative moves between childhood encounters with rescued animals, hospital interiors and early biblical instruction, tracing how the story of Noah’s Ark was introduced as a scaled allegory for catastrophe: manageable, moral, contained. Here, that narrative is re-examined not as promise but as structure: a vessel premised on selection, hierarchy and exclusion. A miniature replica of the installation sits within the work, rendered in resin and paper, restaging the scene at a childlike scale. The Ark persists as both psychological architecture and failing technology—an inherited model of rescue that falters under contemporary ecological pressure. Rather than offering resolution, the work stages an uneasy proximity between care and dread, asking what forms of preparation remain possible when the scale of crisis exceeds the vessels we have been taught to build.
Humanity's Wickedness I & II, 2026, mixed media including cotton, unfired and fired porcelain fragments, 11 x 11 x 8cm, 7 x 7.5 x 8.5cm
This paired sculptural work assembles fired and unfired porcelain into precarious reconstructions. Fragments appear sutured together, as though attempting to repair what has already shattered. The contrast between vitrified and raw clay introduces a tension between permanence and vulnerability. In one form, a pair of arms emerges upward, holding a book. The gesture recalls scriptural authority and the narrative architectures that shape collective behaviour. Stories are figured as both burden and anchor; held tightly, even as the ground shifts. The second form draws on the Ark’s dove, here doubled: two heads conjoined within a single fractured body. Together, the works consider belief as both binding agent and fault line. Reconstruction is possible, but never seamless. The seam remains visible.
Announces Decision to Destroy, 2026, digital print on Hahnemuhle bamboo paper, 76 x 76cm
Two small photographic fragments sit adrift within a sea of white space. Each derives from a salvaged 35mm film cell sourced in Scottsboro, Alabama—a town adjacent to Dry Creek and periodically affected by flooding. In one image, cars cross a bridge as the roadway appears to buckle or shift, the scene registering instability mid-transit. In the other, a body enters water headfirst—dive or panic indistinguishable. Both images capture thresholds: between land and water, control and surrender, narrative and rupture. The title invokes a divine or governmental decree, yet no authority is pictured. Instead, catastrophe is inferred through gesture and atmosphere. The surrounding white amplifies exposure, isolating each scene as evidence. Disaster is not shown in full; it is anticipated. The decision has been made. Action, however, remains uncertain.
Photos: Lucy Foster and project8 gallery ((It is Necessary to) Learn to Swim)
February - April 2026