Various Aquaria

OPENING EVENT: Thursday, 30 July, 5.30-7.30pm

In her new solo exhibition 'Various Aquaria', Erica van Zon turns to the aquarium as both subject and system—an enclosed ecology of circulation, display, and controlled life. 

Think of the extremes that you find fish in, swimming around in their heated glass tanks surrounded by mountain peaks, or welcoming people in transit who have travelled to extreme heights.

Aquariums form the background to core memories, tracking your eyes on fish gently swishing in the hospital waiting room, a comforting view to calm in windowless spaces. Cleverly a fish tank is used as a filter for a special glance between two characters in a movie poster from your youth, or remembering annual trips to the aquarium, chugging around on a conveyor belt with whai repo smiling at you from above.

Perhaps the appeal of the aquarium is also being able to be transported underwater to pavements of pearls without getting wet, a fleeting moment of being elsewhere and in the moment. Often you see yourself reflected back on the glass facade, echoing to where our bodies once belonged millennia ago, swimming with the contents below the meniscus.

Translating captivating captivity with textiles has turned organised nature into another layered view, animals and plants usually in a state of constant movement are frozen still. Sensory play with the sea biscuits and shells in the touch tank at the local aquarium feels like a dream space through rippled glass.

Far from the dull slimy origins of life, fish turn into sparkly souvenirs, accessible symbols found around the house.

On a tour of the Great Barrier Reef it was explained that seeing the living reef wasn’t a fluoro vision, that the dull browny-green coral was alive and normal. 'Various Aquaria' leans towards the hyper-real, a technicolour version of these slippery scenes encased in tempting tanks.

Rather than presenting aquariums as serene or purely decorative, 'Various Aquaria' emphasises their constructedness. Light refracts unevenly; forms hover between clarity and distortion; species appear suspended in a carefully maintained instability. The works hold a subtle tension between attention and control, care and containment.

At the same time, the exhibition remains attentive to van Zon’s broader interest in humour, slippage, and re-seeing the everyday. What appears stable in one moment shifts in the next: a stitched wave becomes pattern, then surface, then illusion again. In this way, Various Aquaria extends a longstanding practice of reworking familiar worlds into constructed, handmade systems—where meaning is always being made, and never quite finished.