Exhibitions

Current Exhibitions

Paula Murray: Resilience

September 10 - December 20, 2026

Paula Murray Skin Deep - DetailMurray’s work is unapologetically beautiful and unafraid to take on some of the most difficult and universal issues of human experience: Breaking and healing, transformation, the search for truth of different kinds, and finding pathways towards reconciliation. In her own words:

“My practice is rooted in the relationship between process, material and meaning. I am drawn to how ceramic materials and processes have affinities with the human condition; how we respond and engage with the injury of experience. By embracing wounds, deeper meaning can be brought to our lives, transforming suffering into something worthy, sensuous, and beautiful.”

Spanning three decades of Paula Murray's artistic practice, the exhibition explores transformation through fracture, revealing resilience, empathy, and the enduring truth that our shared humanity is greater than our differences. At a time of increasing polarization and uncertainty, Resilience offers visitors a space for reflection and connection.

Figure Out: Catastrophe or Regeneration

Paolo Porelli

September 10 - December 20, 2026

Paolo Porelli - Three FiguresItalian sculptor Paolo Porelli’s installation at Alfred is a wildly imaginative human menagerie of often bizarre, quasi-mythological figures. Playing with the Manichean idea that the universe is composed of both constructive and destructive forces, the figures suggest points on the scale between these poles, and thereby hint at the complex and precarious environmental predicament we find ourselves in today.

Viewed through a different lens, his slip-cast creations can be read art-historically as post-modern mutations or re-imaginings of the Italian sculptures of antiquity that still adorn much of his hometown of Rome.

At another level still, they also can be seen as referencing pop-cultural playthings, the dolls and soldiers and science fiction heroes that so often exemplify a worldview of good versus evil. Yet here the heroes and villains are not nearly so clear cut.

However one approaches the work, it is the suggestion of a playful imagination triumphing over mundane stereotypes and received wisdom that is the animating force behind these utterly original figures.

Past Exhibitions