Sullivan+Strumpf is pleased to announce Bloom, an extraordinary exhibition by Australian artist Lynda Draper, exploring new territory for the artist. Opening 19 November 2026 at their Gadigal/Sydney gallery, Bloom presents new works which were conceptualised in, and grew from, Draper’s recent residency at Canberra Glassworks, and the resulting exhibition, Gr’aft.

In antiquity, grafting bordered on sorcery; it was an act of mysterious horticultural creation. To graft was to join what was separate and encourage new growth, specifically in plant propagation. It provided an intervention that could produce something which was hybrid and unexpected.

In Draper’s exhibition Gr’aft, presented at Canberra Glassworks, 6 Aug – 26 Oct 2026, the act of joining became both a material process and a metaphor for collaboration: glass, ceramics and bronze were brought together through a grafting of environments, skills, materials, insights and technical knowledge.

In Bloom the artist takes the idea of grafting a step further, considering what might emerge from these unions of knowledge and material. Here, the emphasis shifts from the graft itself to the growth that follows: emergence, unfolding, expansion and transformation.

A leading figure in contemporary Australian ceramics, with a practice spanning more than four decades, Lynda Draper continues to draw on ideas and formal languages developed in her work in the 1980-90s, however she comes to these languages with a host of new techniques and knowledge. A limited palette and highly worked surfaces evoke wax, confectionery or icing, creating a tactile, almost edible quality.

Organic shapes and recurring funnel-like and globular forms suggest buds, bubbles, organic growth and bodily structures. These biomorphic forms appear to be caught somewhere between the familiar and the strange, as though they are still growing or undergoing transformation. With these structures, Draper strives to create works that appear to possess a life and agency of their own.

Where Gr’aft considered the mysterious potential of joining, Bloom turns towards the consequences
of that connection: the possibility of new forms emerging and taking on a life of their own. Bloom is an unfolding: the moment when something joined begins to open and reveals what it might become.

This exhibition runs concurrently with the solo exhibition, Sis cowie, garden of earthly delights, presented in the Gallery’s upstairs exhibition space.