subterra: the NCCA Members Exhibition 2025

subterra

what lies beneath

We invite NCCA Member Artists to respond to this theme in any way they wish. It can be literal or physical, about a place, or an emotion. It could be what lies beneath a decision, a way of thinking, a framework of society. It could be what triggers certain responses or reactions and makes one feel the way one does. What lies beneath the earth’s crust, the waves, the places we cannot see? Why do any of these things matter? Why do they matter to you?

KEY DATES:

- Entries Close: By Monday 17 November 2025, 5pm

- Launch Party: Thursday 27 November, 6pm

- Exhibition Dates: 28 November – 20 December 2025

- Closing Party & Prizes: Saturday 20 December, 12pm

PRIZES:
Prizes this year are sponsored by Chapman & Bailey. First prize will be awarded by a judging panel and the People's Choice Award will recieve a voucher for Champan & Bailey. 

The judging panel for the main prizes will assess three criteria:

- How well the entry responds to the theme.

- Quality of artistic merit. This includes skill, techniques used and composition.

- Level of innovation, ambition, experimentation or risk-taking.

The panel of judges will be made public after the judging has been finalised.

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Subterra: a brief genealogy of narcissistic western thought

Matthew van Roden

A meteorite is a classic example of an extraterrestrial. Extra, in the sense of being outside, in addition, or beyond the scope of the usual or expected. Terrestrial comes from terra, that is, here, planet earth, our home as earthlings.

What the ‘extra’ of extraterrestrial means, has never been universally held. It has and will no doubt continue to change as our being terrestrials–that is, earthlings by definition created and sustained by this earth–likewise changes.

For example, Aristotle held the view that terra consisted of four elements: earth, water, air, and fire; elements in motion and subject to change. Beyond these were the celestial realm of the planets and of the stars, a realm of clear, consistent, unchanging aether.

Within this worldview, earth, or, terra, is the centre of a concentric universe, albeit sublunary–that is, below the moon. And what lunatics we have been across the ages: tidal, cyclic, tempestuous, moved by deeper forces beneath the surface of our subjectivities, which sparkle on the oceans of our lives, like aftereffects of the setting sun over calmer seas.

Copernicus puts the centrality of terra to bed with his 1543 publication De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (Kopernikus et al., 1992), shattering the long-held belief of a human-centred, concentric universe, placing us in flying orbit around the sun, on a now eccentric, not concentric, planet.

No longer the planetary centre of our solar system, were we content to be, at least separate to nature, human terrestrials as the centre of creation? Darwin’s 1859 publication, On the Origin of Species (Darwin & Bynum, 2009), dissolved any such illusion, placing us thoroughly within the experimental, emergent mesh and fortune of evolutionary processes. Now even the human is eccentric, in terra.

Freud pushed the dial even further in 1899 with his Interpretation of dreams (Freud & Strachey, 1998), articulating a split between the realms of conscious and unconscious being; rendering human terrestrials not even the centre of ourselves.

This seemingly essential eccentricity of the subject is even further radicalised by Deleuze and Guattari in their landmark 1972 publication Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983), where the subject is displaced from its persistence in space and time; understood as a surplus residue of intensities—an after effect of desiring production—more sequential than durable.

If we are beside ourselves, outside ourselves, eccentric in nature, on an eccentric terra.

What lies beneath?

Helium, as a matter of fact, was discovered on the sun before being found here on earth, through practices of spectroscopic celestial aura-gazing, which further confirmed the presence of elements such as Iron, calcium, sodium, and hydrogen in the celestial spheres (Nath, 2013; Schellen, 1872). Confirming, also, the sentiments of the Lord's Prayer, “On earth as it is in heaven”, or the much more ancient, “As above, so below.” So much for aether.

If our meteorites are made of the same stuff of earth. If the most extraterrestrial visitors speak with the same subterranean, elemental tongue. Then what does lie beneath? Are we, on the surface, even as the surface, somehow between it?

Donna Haraway invites us to embrace our eccentricity, to bring our decentred selves and situatedness to the new, old country which she calls, Terrapolis, and I quote, "not the home world for the human as Homo, that ever parabolic, re- and de-tumescing, phallic self-image of the same; but for the human that is transmogrified... into guman that worker of and in the soil” (Haraway, 2016, p. 11)

In other words, we’ve got to get our hands dirty, gotta get our shit together.

This again from Haraway, “Trouble is an interesting word. It derives from a thirteenth-century French verb meaning “to stir up,” “to make cloudy,” “to disturb.” We—all of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response” (p. 1) 

And that brings us here, to Larakia Country, to Vimy Lane, to the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art. To the 2025 Member’s Show, Subterra. To the bumptious kinds of responses that this key organisation supports–through, in spite of, and precisely because of these troubling times. In the way it has held and continues to hold artists, ideas, communities and their discourses.

So thank you all for supporting it.

If you are not already, become a member.

And if you bump into any one of the more than 60 extraordinary artists who have generously offered the fruits of their creative labour for your consideration and edification this evening. Ask them about their work, about their relation to the surface, the subterra that stirs their studios, and the ideas that get under their skin.

Most importantly, enjoy the show.

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1 “From Proto-Germanic and Old English, guman later became human, but both come soiled with the earth and its critters, rich in humus, humaine, earthly beings as opposed to the gods” (Haraway, 2016, p. 169)

Darwin, C., & Bynum, W. (2009). On the origin of species: By means of natural selection or

the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. Penguin.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of

Minnesota Press.

Freud, S., & Strachey, J. (1998). The interpretation of dreams ([3rd English ed.; rev.]). Avon.

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke

University Press.

Kopernikus, N., Kopernikus, N., & Kopernikus, N. (1992). On the revolutions (E. Rosen, Ed.).

Johns Hopkins University Press.

Nath, B. (2013). The story of helium and the birth of astrophysics. Springer.

Schellen, H. (1872). Spectrum Analysis in its Application to Terrestrial Substances, and the

Physical Constitution of the Heavenly Bodies. Longmans, Green, & Co.

https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/2z10wr268

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JUDGING PANEL: 

Kate Fell
Kate Fell is the Artistic Director of Darwin Festival. Kate has over 25 years experience in the arts as a CEO, Creative Director, Program Director and Executive Producer in various venues, festivals and companies, including Brisbane Festival, Circa, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, and Youth Arts Queensland. She was a Creative Director of the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games cultural festival in 2018.

Emily Collins
Emily Collins is the Curator of Southeast Asian Art and Material Culture at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. Before joining MAGNT she worked as an independent curator in South Australia, implementing curatorial and collection projects on Australian art for various institutions and the Arts in Health sector.

Franck Gohier
Franck Gohier is a long-standing Darwin artist whose painting, sculpture and printmaking draw on the Territory’s people, politics and history. Active since 1987, his work appears in major national collections. In 2018 MAGNT presented a major retrospective celebrating his significant contribution to Northern Territory art and culture.