Tara Denny
Permanent Marker

Tara Denny’s Permanent Marker arranges a series of skyline sculptures (all 2025), made as she reconsiders her relationship to boundaries and thresholds, and opacity strategies within her artistic narratives. Using spray paint, found wood, plastic and fragments of a leather jacket, Denny’s work reflects a culture of property and consumption, pitted in contrast to what it may mean to own oneself. Metallic objects slipping between ambiguous assemblages of mostly found and repurposed materials hold traces of the artist’s hand, and quite literally, impressions of their finger marks. Communicating through an obsessively codified system of gestures and references, Denny’s work invokes a long history of women artists and poets navigating societal expectations, in solidarity, yet also paving its own idiosyncratic and personalised trajectory.

Working at times with voracious intensity, Denny uses her hands to stretch wax that is often melted, sculpted and remelted to be reincarnated anew. The artist works seclusively, using her studio to purge charged emotions and rediscover mechanisms for maintaining personal control. As a survivor of psychosis who had to relearn language, the artist has long relied upon non-verbal forms of communication. Retaining this private dialogue of gesture, the interrelated elements within Permanent Marker hold the energy of a psyche in a process of insistent transformation. Echoing the work of local concrete poet Thalia, Denny reprises the arcane secretarial script of shorthand. In a community group, the artist connected with an anonymous older woman who helped translate phrases of text into shorthand. In one of the works that comprise this project, skyline_vip (2025), the artist quotes a line of graffiti she recalls from her time in a psychiatric ward: ‘I could be on a yacht eating pizza instead I am here.’ 

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Tara Denny is an artist working with objects to materialise and manifest the vocabulary of the body. Denny uses her studio as a place for emotional outpouring, abstracting their lived experience into an automatic stream of form. Collaborating with wax and found materials, Denny's works hold living secrets, conveyed only in part, yet remaining inherent within and intrinsic to their production.  She graduated (honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne in 2022. Selected solo exhibitions include A Little Too Much, Blindside, Naarm Melbourne (2024); Twisted Fate, Maroondah Federation Estate Gallery, Naarm Melbourne (2024); I gave you everything but the ending, Airspace Projects, Sydney (2023); A Ton of Gold, FELTspace, Tarntanya Adelaide (2023); Ouroboros, Cathedral Cabinet, Naarm Melbourne (2022); Who’s Who? Nobody Knows! Platform Arts, Geelong (2022); and A pocket for my pencil, George Paton Gallery, Naarm Melbourne (2022). Selected group exhibitions include Gertrude Studios 2024, Gertrude Contemporary, Naarm Melbourne; Entire Days in the Trees, Hair ARI, Naarm Melbourne (2024); Celestial Poetics, Greenhouse Off-site, Naarm Melbourne, (2023); The Turning, Schmick Contemporary, Sydney (2023); and All Worlds Are Flat, Blindside, Naarm Melbourne (2021).