Hilary Skelton & Sue Gilford - 'Fault Lines'

Exhibition Overview — Fault Lines | Hilary Skelton & Sue Gilford

Fault Lines brings together two South Gippsland artists whose practices treat landscape not as a scenic “view,” but as a living system shaped by time, pressure, erosion and human intervention. Across printmaking, pyrography and sculptural construction, the exhibition traces how forces—geological, environmental and personal - leave their marks, creating surfaces that feel both weathered and deliberate.

Hilary Skelton’s works are inspired by the Andes - specifically a visit to Jujuy Province, Argentina (2025) - where exposed strata and mineral colour reveal the land’s structure with striking clarity. She approaches terrain as a physical process of accumulation and collapse, translating uplift and compression through monoprinting and polyester plate printing. Ink is removed as much as applied, allowing wiping, gravity and chance to echo geological forces; in the polyester works, mountain forms remain legible as structural anchors, holding the logic of pressure and time. The resulting images function as quiet translations of how matter and weight leave a trace, rather than literal depictions of place.

Sue Gilford extends printmaking beyond the flat page, exploring impression-based processes through layering, repetition and material transformation - pushing print into three-dimensional forms that blur the boundary between print, object and drawing. Drawing on her environments - home at Agnes and the coastal landscape of Corner Inlet - she reflects on growth, erosion and human intervention, embedding environmental responsibility through reused materials such as op-shop textiles, stripped electrical cables and discarded objects used as tools and surfaces. Pattern becomes both structure and disguise, concealing and revealing origins through impression, spray enamel and transfer, while pyrography introduces an intensely tactile mark - turned into organic forms - grounding the work in touch, labour and the physical presence of materials.

Together, Skelton and Gilford create a compelling conversation between the monumental and the intimate: Skelton’s restrained, layered translations of geological time alongside Gilford’s materially rich works that carry the imprint of reuse, making and lived environment. Fault Lines invites viewers to consider where change is slow and inevitable, where it is abrupt and human-made, and how every surface - rock, coast, object or print - records the forces that shape it.