KUDLILA Season at Samstag Museum to Feature Works by Jemima Wyman and Ida Sophia

Adelaide University's Samstag Museum of Art will launch its Kudlila season, with two new exhibitions exploring how patterns of human behaviour shape connection, power and collective experience.

Kudlila, the Kaurna season when the earth is washed, brings together works by internationally based Australian artists Jemima Wyman and Ida Sophia. Presented across both floors of the gallery, the exhibitions consider human behaviour at both collective and intimate scales, from social movements and protest to relational withdrawal and endurance.

On show until Friday, 18 September, the season features Deep Surface, the first career survey of Los Angeles-based Australian artist and Palawa woman Jemima Wyman, alongside Patience and Penitentia, a new installation and durational performance by Berlin-based South Australian artist Ida Sophia.

In galleries one and three, Deep Surface is a QUT Galleries and Museums travelling exhibition curated by Katherine Dionysius. Spanning three decades, Wyman's practice channels the upheaval, uncertainty, and distress of protest into hypnotic, rhythmic and densely patterned surfaces.

“I'm so proud to have my 30-year survey exhibition Deep Surface take place at Samstag Museum, especially because the Samstag Scholarship changed my life and the course of my art practice,” Wyman said.

“Being able to undertake my Masters abroad has meant that my work is more complex, informed and resilient. I'm forever grateful for this.

“The staging of Deep Surface is such a gift for me in that I get to reflect on the material expression of my life from when I was 17 until now, and witness synchronicities across ideas, materials and processes.”

Wyman's art has traversed drawing, painting, video, performance, sculpture, textiles and collage, with each medium exploring the porous boundaries between bodily interiority and exteriority, perception and experience, and individual and collective identity.

Known for her vivid, kaleidoscopic hand-cut collages, Wyman's practice is a visually and politically charged exploration of camouflage, collective organising, democracy and dissent.

“The exhibition reveals the visual and conceptual complexity that has defined Jemima Wyman's diverse output and traces the evolution of her practice from the mid-1990s to today,” Samstag Director Erica Green said.

“An alumna of the Samstag Scholarship program from 2005, it is wonderful to finally welcome Jemima to Samstag and celebrate her incredible career to date.”

In gallery two, Patience and Penitentia invites audiences into a space of ritual and sustained reflection, considering the effects of power, control, endurance and transformation.

Presented during the 2026 SALA Festival, the installation and durational performance explores the painful and damaging experience of relational withdrawal, often known as the silent treatment. The work examines the power dynamics, strategies of control and forms of punishment embedded in silence.

“Patience and Penitentia is about observing the way silence plays out in our relationships, how endless it can feel and, ultimately, how we hope for reconciliation, love and understanding to prevail,” Sophia said.

“I create sensory, secular spaces for audiences to contemplate their own experiences and witness transformation through live ritual.

“The work has involved more than 40 local women contributing thousands of rose petals and their personal stories. I wanted to show how commonplace silence is, and how enduring it can feel, like an endless penance.

“Conversely, the rose petals come from nurtured, cared-for gardens. This represents a contrast, illuminating the long-term care and resilience we are also capable of.”

Over the course of the exhibition, Sophia will perform a participatory ritual with a select number of performers, incorporating sound, language, movement and gesture to publicly transfigure private suffering through collective release.

“Samstag Museum of Art is pleased to present Ida Sophia's Patience and Penitentia, the latest in our long-standing series of solo presentations by some of South Australia's most compelling contemporary practitioners,” said Samstag Senior Curator Gillian Brown.

“With a meticulously considered visual language, Sophia explores temporal dimensions of making, where extreme psychological states and the limits of endurance become both method and meaning.

“At Samstag, Sophia invites audiences into a space of ritual and sustained reflection, considering the effects of power and control, endurance and transformation. She positions patience not as a passive state, but as an active and durational one, essential to the way we relate to each other and the world more broadly.”

Visit the Samstag Museum of Art website for more information.

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