Melbourne Sculpture Biennale: Soft Systems

What makes a system soft? The trouble with systems is that they are everywhere, provided one is willing to look hard enough. Softness, then, might describe a system’s capacity to adapt and change while retaining its coherence. It is an appealing proposition, though one that risks becoming so accommodating that almost nothing falls outside it. If almost anything can be understood as a system, what does the term actually tell us about the artworks gathered under this banner? As it turns out, some of the exhibition’s most compelling works are those that give this expansive idea a little resistance, while others are all the more enjoyable for seeming rather indifferent to it.

These are some of the questions raised by Soft Systems, curated by Adam Stone and Laura Couttie for the second Melbourne Sculpture Biennale. Following its inaugural edition, The Burden of Objects (2024), at Villa Alba Museum in Kew, the Biennale has relocated from one nineteenth-century mansion to another. This time, the works of twenty artists are dispersed across the eighteen rooms and surrounding gardens of Billilla Mansion in Brighton. Built in 1878 for gold miner Robert Wright, the property was later acquired by pastoralist William Weatherly, who commissioned an extensive remodelling in 1907. The fortunes of mining and pastoralism are written into its architecture. Its grand rooms and manicured grounds were sustained by arrangements of wealth, property, and domestic labour, with the distinctions between those who served and those who were served built into the very organisation of the house. Much of this machinery was designed to operate discreetly, preserving the appearance of effortless domestic comfort. A mansion, after all, is already a fairly elaborate system.

Daylight saving stretched the opening evening a little longer, but as the sun went down, Billilla began to retreat into the shadows. At the end of a corridor, Francis Carmody’s Hawkish: From the Front (2026), an enormous blown-glass eye in graduated shades of orange, appeared implanted in the wall, lending the mansion an unnervingly animate presence. Hawks ordinarily survey their surroundings from above, their advantage lying in seeing without being seen. Carmody’s eye, however, confronted us directly. The less visible it became, the harder it was to shake the feeling that we were being watched.

Other works improved with the darkness. Outside, Beth Maslen’s Moth Lamps (2026) comprises five slender posts standing among the roses, each topped with an oversized bread tag treated with glow pigment. An otherwise disposable piece of domestic plastic packaging has found itself performing the rather more dignified function of a garden lamp.

Inside, the evening was considerably less graceful. Visitors crowded the doorways and narrow passages, squeezing past one another while trying to decipher a rather unhelpful exhibition map. The orientation of the house bore a puzzling relationship to that of the gardens on the map, making navigation something of a guessing game. Even the invigilators seemed uncertain about which works they were supervising. For an exhibition so concerned with systems, it seemed to have gone rather spectacularly awry.

A second visit on a weekend afternoon revealed a much more mischievous exhibition than the opening night had let on. Children tore across the gardens and disappeared down corridors. Parents made themselves comfortable on Sebastian Temple’s long, winding bench, Sponge (2026), a rambling assemblage of scavenged timber, bricks, concrete, river stones, and assorted rubbish, including plastic buttons, a sunglasses lens, an iPhone case, and chewing gum. Its supports resembled the stone cairns found along walking trails, their improbable balance suggesting an almost ritualistic logic. Beneath its ramshackle structure, however, was a surprisingly rigorous arrangement of parts. The impression of whimsy, it turned out, was carefully constructed.

On the front lawn, one child was weaving between Kait James’s three towering flagpoles, their banners bearing the words Deadly, Biik, and Stolenland (2026) in neon bubble lettering that looked more at home on an eighties roller-skating rink or on the label of a small-batch craft beer. Strong winds had the flags snapping and cracking overhead, the aggressive sound at odds with the cheerfulness of their graphics. James has made something of a speciality of dressing uncomfortable truths in the trappings of Australian kitsch. The jaunty graphics make the declarations no less pointed, particularly against the manicured grounds.

A little further along, Naoise Halloran-Mackay’s Birdhouse I, II, and III (2026), hanging from the trees, look more like visual booby traps than nesting boxes. Their wooden surfaces are mapped with improbable arrangements of doorways, staircases, and passages that appear to follow some internal logic, though quite what that logic is remained tantalisingly obscure. No birds were in sight, but the possibility of one concealed within made the structures all the more intriguing. We were reduced to birdwatching by way of speculation.

Back inside, questions of enclosure take on rather less whimsical implications. Isadora Vaughan’s Hypocrites Fidelity (2026) occupies the former servants’ quarters, where wired-glass enclosures are scattered across the room, each roughly the size of a small dog crate or birdcage. They are transparent but hardly inviting. Beneath them lie pages of financial newspapers, with market reports and forecasts quite literally underfoot.

It is difficult not to read the room itself into the work. These are, after all, the servants’ quarters. The connection between Hypocrites Fidelity and its setting threatens to become a little too literal. Yet the old servants’ call board, still mounted in the room, complicates matters. Once used to summon staff from elsewhere in the house, it offers a remarkably economical diagram of power: command, transmission, response. The hierarchy is straightforward enough. Someone rang; someone answered. Vaughan’s cages suggest a less legible arrangement, in which the mechanisms of confinement are apparent but who, or what, is being confined remains uncertain.

This was where Soft Systems seemed most convincing. Vaughan’s enclosures acquired a particular force from their proximity to the servants’ call board, which offered a much less ambiguous account of how power once circulated through the house. Elsewhere, Sebastian Temple’s Sponge made a more practical case for softness: its unlikely assortment of materials could accommodate the weight of visitors only because its seemingly precarious supports had been so carefully arranged.

Christopher Langton’s Situation Room (snookered) (2026) is a rather sillier proposition. Five rainbow-foiled, inflatable figures gather around a pool table, looking like something from a mushroom-fuelled hallucination involving a sci-fi Jeff Koons. Above them hang five emerald-green conical pendant lights, presiding over the gathering with an almost comical symmetry. A particularly enthusiastic invigilator explained that the artists had been allowed to choose their rooms. Apparently, nobody else wanted the one with the snooker table. Langton, however, saw possibilities. Quite how this improbable gathering amounts to a soft system, metaphorical or otherwise, is anyone’s guess. The cumbersome colony of cute beetle-borgs makes for a perversely apt gathering around a game governed by such exacting rules. The room already sets up the game; Langton simply introduces its most unlikely players. I was rather taken with it.

Andrew Atchison’s Endomorph, Mesomorph, Extomorph (2026) is modest in scale but rich in implication. Three PVC pipes of varying heights and girths, each punctured with holes holding freshly picked flowers from the garden, make an unlikely trio of personalities. The title borrows from psychologist William Sheldon’s now-discredited theory of somatotypes, which classified human bodies into three distinct physiques and attributed particular temperaments to their proportions. One seems self-conscious, another competitive, and the third rather friendly. Art history has hardly been immune to this impulse to read character into physical form. Atchison’s delicate assembly makes that enduring compulsion seem both irresistible and faintly ridiculous.

Mira Gojak’s Blocked Light (2026) stands roughly human height, its large tubular columns wrapped in what must be enough sky-blue yarn to exhaust Melbourne’s supply. There is something of a yearning for the infinite in this obsessive repetition, as though the act of winding thread around the structures might continue indefinitely. Positioned near the exhibition’s only exit, the columns seem to draw the open sky into their dense, slightly wobbly forms, its expansive blue painstakingly wound into something finite and material. They stand in loose conversation with the nineteenth-century columns outside, exchanging the architectural assurance of stone and symmetry for the accumulated labour of winding thread. In Gojak’s hands, the suggestion of infinite space is given form through the decidedly finite demands of material, time, and bodily effort. But what, then, are the limits of such expansiveness?

The expansiveness of Soft Systems is both its weakness and its peculiar achievement. Christopher Langton’s inflatable creatures, for instance, are no less entertaining for having a tenuous relationship to the exhibition’s organising idea. Their absurd occupation of the snooker room is compelling enough without requiring them to demonstrate much about systems at all. The exhibition’s generosity towards such eccentricities is welcome, though it leaves one wondering whether the curatorial framework is doing much more than providing them with a place to gather.

The exhibition is far more gripping in its odd particulars than its overarching proposition might suggest. Consider Lou Hubbard’s Dr O’Hare with Foot Stool (2016), tucked away in a linen closet. Hubbard has long exercised a peculiar authority over ordinary objects, subjecting them to acts of restraint, indignity, and occasional humiliation. Here, a whiteboard dressed in a tartan-patterned black vinyl apron and sporting a smiley face made from melted plastic acquires a rather evocative personality. With one leg propped on a red plastic mid-century Michaelis Bayley stool, the whiteboard appears to be striking a coquettish stance. The little display of indecorum is granted the discretion of a linen closet, with a thin metal chain keeping visitors at a respectable distance. Deliciously improper and all the better for it amid the Edwardian respectability. The house, Hubbard seems to suggest, has been keeping a few things to itself.

Billilla Mansion proves a surprisingly accommodating host, though not all its guests are on their best behaviour. It is these moments of mischief that do it for me. The works seem most at ease when they are making a little trouble for the mansion’s cultivated respectability, exposing the peculiar conventions of a house built to keep everything, and everyone, in their proper place. Perhaps the exhibition’s greatest achievement is that its expansive premise leaves the artists enough room to misbehave.

On my way out, I passed between Chris Madden’s two outdoor sculptures O’ Let (2026), one on either side of me, their resin forms bringing to mind a gallbladder and a pair of kidneys, perhaps. Madden has long worked in that slippery territory between anatomy and abstraction. A psychoanalytic reading was tempting, though I suspected it might reveal more about me than the sculptures, or indeed the show. I was beginning to appreciate the virtues of keeping a few things to oneself. Perhaps not every inner working benefits from being brought out into the open.