New Zealand born, South Australia-based Gail Hocking’s practice intersects with the medium of sculpture, installation, site-specific, ephemeral works, sound installations and new media.

Hocking’s current investigative exploration attempts to visually translate the interconnections between body, materiality and ‘non-human others’, (environments, objects, machines and animals), to evoke a sense of vulnerability and transience that might speak of shared human and non-human entanglements.

Strangers of the inside

Gail Hocking is a navigator of internalised terrains; altered topographies that have come into creation from the rapid increase of global roaming and migration.  

In particular, she surveys the personal negotiations of acclimatisation made in-between places, when living with the subtle disjuncture between one home and the next. In this state of re-location, the spatial sense of home we carry within us becomes gradually reckoned with newly encountered places, local rhythms, and unfamiliar atmospheres.

During this time, I imagine our inside-landscapes scrape awkwardly against those outsides coming in, like the earth’s colliding plates, until the edginess wears away into a smoothness where comfort can be sought. Yet re-forming feelings of homely familiarity takes time, for as spatial theorist Paul Carter has observed ‘the migrant does not arrive once and for all but continues to arrive, each new situation demanding a new set of responses, almost a new identity’. [1] 

This long adjustment period, when our bodies detect and subsume many ‘a quiet disturbance’ [2], is the working terrain of Hocking.

Sera Waters - Excerpt from 2016 catalogue I Wash My Steps in Butter, Depot Artspace, Auckland, New Zealand

[1] Paul Carter, Living in a New Country: History, Travelling and Language, (London: Faber, 1992). 3.
[2] This term comes from Shifting Terrains–A Quiet Disturbance which was the title of Gail Hocking’s exhibition at FELTspace, Adelaide SA in 2015.
(Page 2 the inside cover Essay)