Portal

Dolphin Milk Portal, 2025
ceramic ornaments, found material, video

Dolphin Milk is a collaboration between Grace Dewar and Sarah (Lewis), who describe this new work, Portal, as an energy field: a doorway or threshold to an invisible spiritual plane. Gallery visitors are invited to place their hand between two ascending dolphin points in a gesture reminiscent of ancient rituals of attunement:

“You may feel a distinct warmth in your palm, a gentle pulse of energy. For those particularly attuned in the moment, this warmth may travel, moving through the fingers, wrists, and forearms, a quiet but potent transmission.”

This phenomenon is both sensory and ineffable. It may be the subtle effect of body heat reflected between surfaces, the power of suggestion, or something altogether more elusive. The work embraces the way belief and perception shape our experiences, highlighting the fluid boundary between the material and the mystical.

In this work, mass-produced dolphin ornaments serve as standins for a deeper, often commodified yearning. They represent a longing for connection, for meaning, for the spiritual. These objects, typically found in coastal gift shops and homes, become relics of an ersatz spirituality, reflecting the way contemporary culture constructs and substitutes belief.

This work is deeply tied to place, not only through its found materials but through personal memory. Growing up in small towns in regional Queensland, the artists have an intimate connection to the aesthetics and mythologies of coastal life, the way marine imagery, particularly dolphins, takes on an almost sacred quality. In towns like Hervey Bay, these motifs are ubiquitous, appearing on signage, souvenirs, public sculptures, and home décor. They form a shared visual language, a collective dreaming of connection to the ocean and its creatures.

Portal was developed during a residency on Butchulla Country supported by the Regional Arts Development Fund, a partnership between the Queensland Government and Fraser Coast Regional Council to support local arts and culture in regional Queensland.

Strange Kinship was curated by Sarah Louise Thomson for Hervey Bay Regional Gallery, 23 August 2025 – 16 November 2025.

Drawing on the region’s reputation as a whale watching capital, Strange Kinship brought together international and Australian artists to examine our desire to understand and connect with animals.

Artworks in Strange Kinship looked specifically at animals with significance to Butchulla Country—such as whales, sharks, dolphins and birds—exploring the very human ways in which we come to identify or disidentify with these species. Taking its name from the work of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Strange Kinship asksed us to consider our co-habitation of a shared physical world, while acknowledging the unique ways we experience and inhabit it through our vastly different bodies.

Featured artists traced the importance of mythology, spirituality and storytelling in connecting with animals in the past and present. Some artworks delved into the deep human desire to communicate with and better understand non-human life, exposing the limits of our perception and prompting curious speculation. While other works revealed how animals are turned into images, products, and attractions—caught in cycles of consumption that threaten their survival.

Rather than attempting to represent non-human perspectives, Strange Kinship inverted the gaze, inviting deeper reflection on human nature and how culture shapes our perception of the world around us.

Including work by Australian and international artists Allora & Calzadilla (in collaboration with Ted Chiang), Fernando do Campo, Dolphin Milk, Gabriella Hirst, Nicholas Mangan, Trent Mitchell, Deb Mostert, the Unbroken Whispers project team (Dr. Jodi Edwards, Natalia Baechtold & Dr Chels Marshall) and featuring The Dolphin Embassy Archives (curated by the New Landscapes Institute).

Photography: Cody Fox