EASS 2025
Zali Odlum, Sophie Kihara-Murer & Madeleine Forner
This exhibition brings together the 2025 Strathnairn Arts EASS recipients; Zali Odlum, Sophie Kihara-Murer & Madeleine Forner. Presenting work by three emerging artists whose practices engage with materiality, identity and the complexities of contemporary experience. Working across ceramics, mixed media and painting, their works explore themes of ecological fragility, grief and repair, and cultural reclamation.
Zali Odlum, Everlasting Impermanence, 2025, Ceramic, dimensions variable.
Zali Odlum
Working across, ceramics, glass and mixed-media, Zali Odlum’s art practice investigates the entangled relationships between materiality, human intervention, ecological depletion and environmental resilience. Her works often confront the tensions between natures inherent impermanence and the human drive for permanence, challenging how this desire shapes and often exacerbates contemporary ecological degradation. Tangled, knotted, and interweaved forms reflect the complex interwoven connections between humans and the environment, drawing on both subterranean and surface references. Her forms reflect the emotional weight of living in a time of ecological uncertainty where connection is held in fragile tension. Drawing on materials embedded in natural processes, she often incorporates wood ash in her ceramic glazes embodying the tactility of transformation, speaking about decay and renewal, a form of ecological resilience. Zali invites her audience to reflect on material consequences of human intervention, the fragility of ecological life, and the resilience embedded in processes of transformation and decay.
Sophie Kihara-Murer, installation view, 2025 dimensions variable.
Photographer: Brenton McGeachie
Sophie Kihara-Murer
Sophie Kihara-Murer’s work explores expanded painting as a site of Black reclamation. Layering found and reclaimed materials including hessian, crochet, yarn, postcards and paint. She constructs richly textured surfaces that speak to cultural survival and belonging. Each work carries traces of diasporic memory, reflecting the instability and transformation of identity.
Language weaves through these surfaces as slurs, Swahili words and fragments of text become material marks. In reclaiming words once used to wound, Kihara-Murer transforms them into symbols of resilience. Drawing on African textile histories alongside Western art traditions, her practice engages with abstraction, repair and material storytelling. These works operate as acts of becoming - piecing together what was lost, misnamed or silenced, and offering a visual language for diasporic presence and Black excellence.
Madeleine Forner, lingers, 2025, acrylic and thread on hessian, 76 x 108 x 7 cm.
Photographer: Brenton McGeachie
Madeleine Forner
Madeleine Forner’s work explores a sensory field of colour that intersects chroma, sculptural perception and vulnerability. Forner’s work reflects on the emotional complexity of grief through intuitive processes and sustained colour introspection. Fragmented emotions expand into abstract, amorphous forms, where tone, texture and movement create shifting visual rhythms.
Stitching becomes a central gesture within the works, physically altering the painted surface and creating moments of repair. Through this process, the act of making becomes a space for regulation and reflection, allowing the paintings to hold both vulnerability and the possibility of healing.