The Window, Fragmented by Lucy Zola & Where Clay Meets Water by Shenshen Zheng.
Lucy Zola
Lucy Zola is a visual artist and musician from Kaurna Land (Adelaide, South Australia). After completing a Bachelor of Contemporary Art at the University of South Australia in 2021, she spent a year and a half abroad on a scholarship, undertaking internships, studies, and artist residencies across South Korea, Malaysia, Nepal, Hong Kong, and Mongolia.
Working across interactive digital graphic notations, experimental film, photography, sculpture, and sound, Zola uses the recurring motif of windows to explore the tensions and dichotomies in her life - a deep fear and fascination with darkness, the feeling of being profoundly alone while surrounded by people, the paradoxical pain and pleasure of solitude, and the dual nature of home as both prison and sanctuary.
Her work has been recognised with numerous awards, including the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade New Colombo Plan Scholarship, the Friends of the Australian School of Art Prize (2019), the Valda and Max Mycko Grant for Visual Arts (2019), and the Australian and New Zealand Cultural Arts Prize (2017).
Zola’s recent exhibitions include Through My Window (Floating Goose Studios, 2025, solo), Lustre (Royal South Australian Society of Arts, 2025, solo), Windows and Silence (Po Leung Kuk V54 Artist Residency, Hong Kong, 2024, solo), No Place Like… (Household, 2025, group), In Collaboration With (Household for Adelaide Design Week, 2025, group) and Accent (Urban Cow Studio, 2021, group).
the window, the window, the window
In 2023-24 artist Lucy Zola travelled to Mongolia, Hong Kong, Nepal, Malaysia, Macau and South Korea, spending months in each of these countries as an artist-in-residence, a visitor, and a student.
Ostensibly, developing skills working with a range of materials — from ceramics, glass, photography, experimental film and sound to interactive digital art — she was also experiencing being in the world, though moving through it in a state of extreme solitude.
The techno-gothic artworks in Zola’s exhibition emerge from this heightened psychological terrain, characterised by a state of receptiveness, curiosity, and strain. Plaiting together the various strands of her emergent art practice, on display are a series of compactly scaled photographs of reflections in glass, a sonic interactive digital collage, and ceramic wall objects. Coalescing around a persistent, potent symbolic refrain – the window – Zola’s artworks transfigure this experience through a kind of haptic synthesis.
In Western art traditions, the window functions as a construct, a framing device, an architectural feature and a screen that focuses attention on the threshold between internal and external worlds, signalling a psychological shift that foregrounds interiority. This liminal zone is a space of thoughts, inner musings, and rumination. In Gothic literature, this suggestible state of being exposes the individual to supernatural forces and possibly macabre influences beyond their consciousness or control. Zola’s glitchy, ghostly work provokes a sense of unease as though subjectivity shifts to reflect this instability.
In their photographs of the glass panes of city windows, the artist captures a sense of gazing at windows, as though trying to discern the lives lived behind their opaque surfaces. On the edge of figuration and abstraction, these works contain an eerie, lurid distortion that is further emphasised by being encased in hand-built ceramic frames.
An interactive digital artwork in the exhibition features an abstracted photographic collage embedded with audio that the artist has coded using over one hundred snippets of recordings made while walking around Hong Kong to the images’ X and Y coordinates. Activated by the movement of a mouse as it tracks across the screen, the work synthesises into its very surface the effort of interpreting and organising sensory information in a new environment.
Clinging to the gallery wall like snug animal habitats, Zola’s cute wall objects are darkly cartoonish. Dotted with wonky windows, they offer protection, but also, to be clear, a terrifying level of exposure
Anna Zagala
Anna Zagala is a writer, curator and designer living in Tarntanya / Adelaide.
Shenshen Zheng
Shenshen Zheng is an emerging visual artist living and working on Kaurna Country (Adelaide). Graduated from Adelaide Central School of Art with a Bachelor of Visual Art in 2024, her multidisciplinary practice celebrates cultural diversity and investigates the complex relationship between humans and the natural environment through drawing, painting, ceramics, installation and social engagement. Zheng has exhibited in group exhibitions at ACE Gallery, Heysen Sculpture Biennial, Central Gallery, Brunswick Street Gallery, Mrs Harris’ Shop, and Royal Society of Arts South Australia. She was also the recipient of the SALA Festival resident for Nexus Art in 2024 that resulted in her first solo exhibition.
cc: Post Office Projects Gallery
Dear Kororoit Creek, My name is Emily, I am a settler on Wurundjeri land and my family are migrants from Czechia and the Netherlands. We met when Shenshen Zheng, an artist friend of mine, invited me to walk with her along your waterway on the western volcanic plains, during her residency at Hyphenated Projects.
Like Shenshen, I plan to bury this letter underneath the cool mud of your floodplain, among the silver wattle. A copy will be printed for human visitors to her art exhibition as well; I hope that you don’t mind if I ‘cc’ them in.
On the day of our walk together, Shenshen led me to the keeping place of a letter that she had passed to you. We uncovered the letter from beneath a thin substrate of river silt and clay; the paper smelt damp and sweet.
At the time, I wanted to ask you about Shenshen’s message, but this felt like too intimate of a request. That is the nature of a letter written to a friend—it’s personal. As a child, the letters that I penned were sealed with love hearts; ‘for you’, I would say, pressing my paper treasure into a familiar palm.
I feel the same way about Shenshen’s watercolour paintings. Shenshen told me that she paints alongside you en plein air, collecting freshwater to use to moisten her brush. I like the way the creek water softens her palette and spills colour across the page.
My favourite drawing is of a landscape view from a bus window. Do you remember it? It was sketched during Shenshen’s journey to Altona Bay—the place where you meet the sea. The drawing stretches across a long strip of folded paper. When the drawing was finished, Shenshen slid the paper tongue along the tops of the rye grass that grows along your bank, each lick catching beads of dew.
What I am trying to say is, I think that you two work well together.
Shenshen’s exhibition is a peek into the personal correspondence between an artist and her close collaborators. However, I know that the meaning of a handwritten letter is best understood by the sender and receiver.
Emily Simek
Emily Simek is interested in relational practices within food webs and local networks of exchange; she makes art on Wurundjeri land.