Sarah Contos: Crushing Shrinking Violets

4 December - 30 May 2025

Gallery Exterior

Sarah Contos is an acclaimed Sydney-based artist whose kaleidoscopic installations obsessively untangle and reconstitute identity, technology, history and selfhood through cinema and popular culture. Contos sees the world as a massive, interconnected collage that can be picked apart and put back together – her own private Frankenstein. Collage is a conceptual and material proposition for Contos that is inherited from art history but recirculated through a psychosexual critique of desire and domesticity viewed through the lens of personal experience.

Commissioned as the first in a series of biannual artist projects responding to Wollongong Art Gallery’s exterior panels, Crushing Shrinking Violets is a bold digital collage patterned from some of the recurring tropes of Contos’s visual language – studs, chains, tulle and cats. Intended to wrap and bind the grandeur of the building in fancy dress, Crushing Shrinking Violets is a playful ode to the exposure of private reverie through public display.

Image: Sarah Contos, Crushing Shrinking Violets, 2024 (detail). Courtesy of the artist and Station, Australia.