Kane Alexander

Oneness

Exhibition Runs: 28th Nov - 12th December 2025

Opening Reception: 28th November // 6-9pm

Address: 656 Bridge Rd, Lower Ground RICHMOND VIC

Enquiries: hello@thoughtformsgallery.com.au

These works begin with chunks of concrete salvaged from waste, cut, ripped, and divided when demolished from buildings. I polish one face, leave the fractures, cracks, marks, and steel reinforcement, or 'reo,' visible, and stand each fragment as a stone tablet to test time. They are built things unbuilt, re-formed into objects that ask to be read rather than walked on. The intention is to notice how matter moves through roles: footing, rubble, sculpture, or the many other patterns of transformation matter makes.

Concrete is poured to hold shape, carry weight, and last long for a purpose. The steel reo both makes it stronger and weaker; if the reo is exposed to oxygen, it corrodes and expands, pushing the concrete apart over an extended timeline. The concrete tablets turn that utility into a surface of attention. Jagged edges, reo emerging, exposed aggregate, and cracks show that the materials record both the will to endure and the forces that undo it. The work is about matter’s transformation across time scales, both in human perception and time scales beyond our perception.

The texts are sandblasted by tombstone makers into the faces of these pieces to be read for as long as the language can be understood or until the matter is again reformed. Their economy is deliberate. The fewer the words, the more the surface speaks.

Photographs were made in North Queensland, where water writes its own long story, a garden built in the rainforest by the Catalan migrant José Paronella (Paronella Park, 1930s). The site has been remade repeatedly by fire, floods, and cyclones across decades and sustained as a living heritage place in the present.

Paronella sourced sand and gravel from the on-site creek and poured much of the site’s concrete on location. The use of local aggregates, specifically mica, a crystal often used in makeup for its shimmer, contributed to this concrete mix’s gradual deterioration, repairs, and bracing in parts of the complex.

Waterfalls and rivers run with great variation throughout the tropical rainforest, carving bedrock and seeding new growth. I travelled there at a time of year hoping for heavy rains. When I photographed there, floodwaters were moving through, surfaces were dark with saturation, and foliage was luminous. Shot on film, moisture on lenses, water damage on film, and large limitations with exposure were intentional as part of the work. The camera holds a moment; the site keeps moving.

Across the sculpture and the images, the concern is the same: how forms pass through states and how our sense of permanence is really a calibration of time and our own perception. On a human scale, a century feels “permanent”; on a river’s scale, it is an event; on a geological scale, it is a ripple.

Together, the sculpture and photographs approach oneness not as a mystical state but as an observable fact of exchange. Water becomes stain; stain becomes image; image becomes a reason to look longer. Concrete becomes footing; footing becomes fragment; fragment becomes a thing we might keep safe for another hundred years. And even that safety is provisional, the wave that never repeats, yet is always a wave.

What lasts does so by changing; what changes leaves marks that last.

Opening Night Experience

Join us for an immersive evening surrounded by art, music, and conversation.
• Live performance by composer Christian DiMarco
• Complimentary drinks
• Meet the artist and preview the full exhibition before public release

These are four preview artworks from the exhibition. Full catalogue will be released one week prior to show. Register here to be notified when catalogue is released.