Current Exhibitions
April-May 2026
More Than... & Too Much
The Calico Cat Gallery is excited to bring a new exhibition comprised of South Australian-based emerging artists, Liesl Cosh and Cate Jones. Liesl and Cate complement each other’s works by acknowledging the female experience using their different methodologies of creating with intriguing paintings and ceramics.
Liesl Cosh with More Than...
Liesl is currently studying at the Adelaide Central School of Art; meanwhile, her many years of work in disability and refugee support led to a deep interest in the complex, often overlooked stories of people's lived experiences. This perspective shapes her painting practice, which frequently focuses on everyday scenes that reveal facets of the human experience. Working primarily in oils, Liesl's paintings are defined by expressive brushwork, vibrant colour, and rich textural surfaces. She brings light, atmosphere, and the emotional resonance of ordinary life to the forefront, transforming ideas, feelings, and reference images into vivid, tactile forms. For Liesl, painting is both an act of exploration and a place of deep joy, where colour, texture and mark-making become a way of reflecting on the richness of ordinary life.
Through the works in More Than..., Liesl explores how painting can hold and communicate lived experience, engaging subjects and meanings that both sit within and push beyond the traditional boundaries of portraiture and representation. Each work emerges from a conversation between Liesl and the subject, in which the women are invited to reflect on what it means to be a woman in the world in 2026. Themes and compositional ideas are distilled from these dialogues and developed collaboratively. Giving the women a sense of voice and agency throughout the process has been central to both the series and Liesl's practice.
Liesl Cosh, 2026
More Than… is a figurative exhibition examining the interplay between social, cultural and religious constructs of femininity and the lived realities of contemporary Australian women. Through large portraiture and the repeated motifs of miniature representations, the series explores motherhood, wifedom, migration and cultural identity, and chronic illness as sites where the tension between idealised femininity and embodied experience plays out. The accompanying still life works explore cultural and religious narrative symbols of the feminine (such as the forbidden fruit), while echoing the material motifs present in the portraits.
Liesl Cosh, 2026
Cate Jones with Too Much
Cate began pottery classes at the beginning of the pandemic and was immediately addicted to clay. She had worked in contemporary arts and has been a painter for most of her life, but clay gave her substance. Cate finds wonder in the imperfection of hand-bulinding.
She loves that clay flops and curves, creating its own organic shape.
Cate's work is informed by her love of decorating, which she sees as her life's purpose; beautifying in her own eccentric way. The lushness of nature and the irresistible power of myths inspire her.
Cate's work also draws on subversive humour, some of it designed to celebrate women's genitals, and this is related to the positive enjoyment of her own. Cate has a desire to create curious, vibrant domestic pieces that counter the derivative nature of consumerist objects. Too Much is a collection of hand-crafted and decorated pottery celebrating nature expressed with both whimsy and deliberation.
