Kieran Butler, A Gift of Cherry Guavas and Hibiscus Flowers, 2025, installation view at Incinerator Gallery. Photography by Gianna Rizzo.
Kieran Butler, A Gift of Cherry Guavas and Hibiscus Flowers, 2025, installation view at Incinerator Gallery. Photography by Gianna Rizzo.
Kieran Butler, A Gift of Cherry Guavas and Hibiscus Flowers, 2025, installation view at Incinerator Gallery. Photography by Gianna Rizzo.
Kieran Butler, A Gift of Cherry Guavas and Hibiscus Flowers, 2025, installation view at Incinerator Gallery. Photography by Gianna Rizzo.
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A Gift of Cherry Guavas and Hibiscus Flowers: Part 1

1 February 2025 - 30 March 2025

Curator:

Artist(s): Kieran Butler

Location: Boadle Hall

This exhibition reflects on the complexities of gift economies within cultural, environmental, familial, generational, and queer contexts. The work functions as a meditation on gifts as both acts of love letters and survival strategies, posing them as provocations for deeper reflection. The artist addresses these offerings to themself, their ancestors, their descendants, and those they love in the present, unpacking the duality of inherited gifts that can be simultaneously nurturing, hostile, nostalgic, and beneficial to our contemporary moment and imagined futures.

Part 1 is about sitting and holding these gifts when they are received. meditating on the ways we may embrace, reject, nurture, change, or adapt how we sit with them and how they are received in the world.

At the heart of the exhibition are the cherry guavas and hibiscus flowers passed down from the artist’s Mauritian ancestors and grandparents. These plants, with their delicious fruits and vibrant blooms, embody a paradox—while they offer beauty and sustenance, they also threaten the biodiversity of both Australian and Mauritian ecosystems. Through these symbols, Kieran explores the responsibilities tied to inheritance: the gifts received, the ones still to be given, and the ways in which reciprocity can be practiced with intention and care.

This exhibition asks: How do we embody the responsibilities that come with inherited gifts? How can we engage in gift economies thoughtfully, with love and care, to ensure that the world we pass on is better than the one we received?

Kieran Butler is an artist, designer, and creative producer. Their practice spans across photography, textiles, performance, and graphic design. Kieran’s research seeks to examine inclusive and sustainable creative practices at the intersections of New Formalism in Photography, Environmentalism, Solarpunk and Patchwork movements within a trans-neuroqueer framework. Their work reflects on themes of queer identity, familial histories, gift economies, and environmental crises as accompanied by experiences of desire, grief, hope, intimacy, love, selfawareness, vulnerability, and rage. Kieran aims to present provocations that spark hopeful, sustainable and inclusive visions of near futures, ways of living and proposals to get there. Ultimately, their practice seeks to contribute to the growing literature on trans-neuroqueer lived experiences, and sustainable and inclusive creative practices; resources that were not readily accessible to them as a young person. They live and work across the lands of Wurundjuri Woi-wurrung people.

Recent career highlights include solo exhibitions at BLINDSIDE (Melbourne, VIC, 2018), ANCA (Dickson, ACT, 2018), Sawtooth ARI (Launceston, TAS, 2019), Peacock Gallery (Auburn, NSW, 2019), and Verge Gallery (University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, 2022). Public art commissions for City of Sydney Siteworks: Creative Hoardings program (Sydney, NSW, 2019-present), the Inner West Council Newtown Art Seat (Newtown, NSW, 2021), and Transport for NSW Safer Cities Program in collaboration with Sydney World Pride and Culture Capitol (Newtown, NSW, 2023).

Friday, 31 January, 6-8pm

The opening night, with speeches and a Welcome to Country, will be held at Incinerator Gallery alongside exhibitions CHTHONIC CHORUS, From things flow what we call time, and Mother's Little Helpers.

TBC