The Cross Art Projects. Art Gallery, Sydney, Kings Cross, NSW. About us.

GHOST STATES: Karen Mills and Sarah Pirrie

Opening Saturday 13 September, 2 pm
Opening talk by artists Karen Mills and Sarah Pirrie with guest speakers Dr Wendy Garden (Head of Audience, Education & Learning, Museum and Art Gallery Northern Territory) and Rebecca Ray (Curator, First Nations Art, MCA)

Conversation Saturday 11 October at 2pm
On the state of Northern Australia’s mangrove forests with Dr Kerrylee Rogers (Professor School of Earth, Atmospheric and Life Sciences, University of Wollongong)

Exhibition runs 13 September to 11 October 2025

Conversation: On the state of Northern Australia’s mangrove forests with Dr Kerrylee Rogers (Professor School of Earth, Atmospheric and Life Sciences, University of Wollongong). Saturday 11 October at 2pm

In Ghost States, artists Karen Mills and Sarah Pirrie visualise the ebb and flow of their two-decades long conversation on the fleeting traces or ghost movements of objects in landscapes and composition. The artists have sketched together and worked on projects with specialists and colleagues on intercultural collaborations often in response to rare and endangered environments. The idea of a trace or ghost suggests the term “punctum” used by Roland Barthes to describe an incidental but personally poignant detail in a photograph which pierces or prompts a meaning particular to a viewer.

Ghost States is the duo’s second collaborative exhibition at The Cross Art Projects, the first being Sediments: Karen Mills and Sarah Pirrie — 6 to 27 May 2017. Like the earlier exhibition, Ghost States comprises two discreet series bound by speculation on how artists think and make work. Karen Mills’ collagraphs combine the vocabulary of printmaking with the sensibility of watercolour. She prints in layers from a matrix made of textured card (not the traditional metal plates used in etching), building an image from studio fragments or resonant objects gathered from landscapes, to compose an artist’s tidal line of memories and marks.

Sarah Pirrie finds her ghost objects on the shoreline, sourced from walks around Darwin and its Harbour. Here the wrackline marks the intertidal zone: the line of debris between land and the sea’s high-water mark. This changing composition of organic and inorganic materials offers the attentive beachcomber a gateway into a local and planetwide marine system. Organic components may include seagrasses, terrestrial plants, driftwood, and stranded animal remains. Common inorganic components include plastics, fishing line, and other manmade materials, for example detonators for explosives or fireworks. In the studio they are composed into assemblages to be drawn or perhaps embedded onto a gelatine print bed and then transferred to paper, or perhaps re-worked.

Karen Mills’ new series of collagraphs are made with another long-term collaborator, the master printmaker Basil Hall, a former art lecturer at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, now based in Canberra. The collagraphs re-form and re-frame studio fragments and found objects as if to create a new page or a book, from which the text has been scraped or erased as if in preparation for reuse. This engagement is conceptually aligned to Mills’ earlier ‘road trip’ works reconnecting her to the ancestors’ landscapes as histories wiped clean, then re-claimed as a palimpsest.

Art historian Jessyca Hutchins notes on Karen Mills’ print work in Shifting Ground (exhibition catalogue, Kluge Ruhe Museum, 2024): “This language of repeated forms within prints by Karen Mills evoke the stone tools and stone flakes of her ancestral homelands in the East Kimberley of Western Australia. The repetitive grammar of print can connect to ideas of the cyclical, the re-enacted, and the re-performed. Whether small yams, traces in sand, flaked stones, or kinship pairings, the power of these forms lies in their cyclical returns over time. The visual format of a print series meditating on the same forms (sometimes pulled from the same original plate) captures this sense of repetition and difference, return and renewal.”

Sarah Pirrie’s assemblages reference a “garbalogical analysis of the world”, the thinking that humble detritus can help peel back of layers of history. Darwin’s shorelines have always been contested, for example, and reach back to the Frontier Wars and zones excised from the town’s plan to ‘re-house’ dispossessed Indigenous people, leading subsequently to encompass land rights battles by Larrakia people and their allies; actions that have often also protected the foreshores. Today the wrack line tells stories of another war: it is a zone of environmental contestation over petrochemical complexes, destruction of sacred Larrakia sites for military housing and broadscale clearing of forests of mangroves and detonating and dredging for shipping channels. As successive governments proudly proclaim the “northern frontier”, artists and writers scour the battle lines for evidence of the crimes hidden by self-serving bombast.

In the town of Darwin, a colonial administrative centre, every humble place has a wrack line and a contested history that shifts daily. The artists’ collaboration began at Nomad Projects in Darwin and has continued at The Cross Art Projects as an independently developed exchange exploring the ghostly movements of colonisation in contemporary art and its multiple social and environmental impacts.

— Jo Holder

Artist Statements
Sarah Pirrie, Two Ends, 2025, text from Rizo publication
Sarah Pirrie, After Saltpetre Has Been Spent, 4 July 2025, Larrakia Country, Darwin, Northern Territory, text from Rizo publication
Karen Mills, Ghost States, 2025, text from Rizo publication
Basil Hall, Some thought on a printmaking collaboration with Karen Mills, 2025

The Cross Art Projects, Artist Exhibition. Tomorrow … The Future

Karen Mills, Untitled, 2025, unique collagraph, 56 x 52.5 cm. Printed at Basil Hall Editions, Canberra. Photo: Fiona Morrison.

Karen Mills, installation view, Ghost States, 2025.

Sarah Pirrie, Cable and Cord, 2025, graphite, gouche, ink, lithography ink on Tengucho Paper, 97 x 215 cm. Photo: Simon Hewson.

Sarah Pirrie, Wrack Marginalia, 2025, graphite, lithography ink on Arches and Tengucho paper, mangrove timber, 50 x 175 cm. Photo: Simon Hewson.

Sarah Pirrie, installation view, Ghost States, 2025.

Sarah Pirrie, Line of Defence, 2025, graphite, gouche, ink, lithography ink on Tengucho paper, 189 x 191 cm (suspended work). Photo: Simon Hewson.

Sarah Pirrie, Line of Defence, 2025, graphite, gouche, ink, lithography ink on Tengucho paper, 189 x 191 cm (suspended work)(detail). Photo: Simon Hewson.

Sarah Pirrie, Coralline and flotsam, 2025, watercolour and dye on Arches paper with lithography ink on Tengucho Paper overlay, 57 x 53.5 cm. Photo: Simon Hewson.

Sarah Pirrie, Mangroves and Saltpetre 02, 2025, graphite, lithography ink on Arches and Tengucho Paper, 56 x 56 cm. Photo: Simon Hewson.

Sarah Pirrie (L) Wrack Marginalia, 2025, graphite, lithography ink on Arches and Tengucho paper, mangrove timber, 50 x 175 cm. (M) Mangrove Flash, 2025, graphite, gouache, lithography ink on Tengucho paper, 90 x 150 cm. (R) Two Ends Series, Marginalia (no.1-VII), graphite, lithography ink on Arches and Tengucho paper. Various sizes.(Installation view). Photo: Simon Hewson.

Sarah Pirrie, Mangrove Flash, 2025, graphite, gouache, lithography ink on Tengucho paper, 90 x 150 cm. Photo: Simon Hewson.

Sarah Pirrie, Chain Reaction, 2025, graphite, gouache, liquid paper, lithography ink on Tengucho Paper, 60 x 80 cm. (Detail).

Karen Mills and Basil Hall, Basil Hall Editions, Canberra 2025.

Sarah Pirrie, Riso studio, Split-Shift Press 2025.

Mangroves and Drones, 2025 produced by Professor Kerrylee Rogers and includes contributions from staff and PhD students and University of Wollongong. Thanks to: Northern Land Council. Lower Gulf of Carpentaria Aboriginal Land Council and Cape York Aboriginal Land Council.

Artist Biographies

Karen Mills is a Garramilla/Darwin, Northern Territory, based artist. She is a descendant of the Balanggarra people, of the Oombulgurri and Forrest River Aboriginal Reserve, in the East Kimberley, Western Australia. Her practice investigates identity, connection and disconnection with her Aboriginal heritage and the timeless relationship Aboriginal peoples maintain with their ancestral country despite recent histories of dispossession and displacement. Her abstract paintings are generally landscape-based, inspired by her experience and memory of country. These works capture a sense of the rich history and survival of Aboriginal culture concealed within the ground.

Mills was a participating artist in the Tarnanthi exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, in 2015 and 2021. She was a participating artist in the inaugural edition of The National: New Australian Art, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, in 2017. Mills was a finalist in the Guirguis New Art Prize 2019, at the Ballarat Art Gallery, Ballarat and was a finalist in the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Awards, at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, in 1998, 2004 and 2008.

In 2024 Mills was invited to undertake an artist residency at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, as part of the program for the Shifting Ground exhibition, which featured work by 22 artists who had produced prints with Basil Hall Editions. Her work is held in collections including the Australian Catholic University, National Gallery of Australia, Charles Darwin University, Parliament House of Australia, RMIT University, Art Gallery of South Australia and private collections nationally and internationally.

Karen Mills is represented by Alcaston Gallery in Melbourne.

Sarah Pirrie has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions in Australia since 1995 including solo exhibitions Coastal Links, Northern Territory Library, Creative in Residence (2017); Terraforming at Nomad Gallery, Darwin (2014); and Runoff at Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (2012). She has curated many significant exhibitions of contemporary art from Northern Australia usually with an inter-cultural focus for example, Counting tidelines, featuring seven female Indigenous artists from Northern Territory and Tasmania (co-curator, 2015) and We eat we are, an exhibition toured by Artback NT (2021-22).

Sarah Pirrie is the curator of Pirrie Space in Darwin, a space for artists to test new ideas and a venue for interdisciplinary conversation, runs a post-production facility with Matthew Van Roden and teaches at Charles Darwin University.

Links / Downloads

Shifting Ground exhibition catalogue, Kluge Ruhe Museum, 2024 > Download as pdf
Middle Arm Industrial Precinct (Darwin Harbour), Report of Senate Inquiry Parliament of Australia, 2024 > Download as pdf

Acknowledgements

Karen Mills thanks Basil Hall for his inspiring and enduring collaboration and Kari Gilbert. Sarah Pirrie thanks Nomad Art and Matthew Van Roden. The Cross Art Projects thanks Belle Blau, Reiana Aramoana, Simon Blau and Phillip Boulten.

Each book designed by the artists and printed at SPLIT/SHIFT PRESS, Darwin University.

GHOST STATES: Karen Mills and Sarah Pirrie

GHOST STATES: Karen Mills and Sarah Pirrie

ENDS

Exhibition Archive