False Feeling

Lauren Burrow
Erin Crouch
Renee Cosgrave
Neika Lehman
Ben Richardson
Katie West

Curated by Olivia Koh 

False Feeling responds to the term “pathetic fallacy” coined in art and literature by English cultural critic John Ruskin (b.1819). The term defines a writer’s overly sentimenta attribution of human feeling to the surrounding environment, inanimate objects and animals, translating from Latin to English as ‘false emotions’. Moving away from these critical origins, False Feeling considers works that instead, measure a separation between an artist’s sensibilities and their relationship to the external. Artists in nipaluna | Hobart and Naarm | Melbourne respond to perceived pressures in relation to nature, landscape, language systems, religious figures and narratives. False Feeling reconsiders contemporary and traditional functions of natural and found objects and the malleability of language analogous to the shaping of materials in painting, sculpture, video and ceramics.


Olivia Koh is an artist living and working on unceded lands of the Kulin nation (oliviakoh.net). She co-organises recess, an online platform for moving-image works with Kate Meakin and Nina Gilbert (recess.net.au).

Opening Event: 5.30pm, Friday 2 August
Exhibition runs: 10-5pm 2nd-3rd August, 2019 
Fern Tree Community Centre Getting there: www.metrotas.com.au/timetables/hobart/fern_tree/ 

CONSTANCE acknowledges and respects the palawa people as the traditional and ongoing owners and custodians of lutruwita. We pay our respects to elders past, present and future, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.

CONSTANCE ARI 2019 program is assisted through Arts Tasmania by the Minister for the Arts._.