Jennifer Mathews

About the work

Jennifer Mathews is a Tarndanya (Adelaide) based sculptor whose practice explores the symbolic power of architectural and industrial forms. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, she investigates how built environments quietly influence behaviour, movement, and relationships of power. Her recent work has been presented in the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, and she is represented by Laila Gallery.

Images

About the artist

Lean Station (2026) suggests a new way of working. A lay-back, if you will, ergonomic work station that invites you to log on for the day, settle in, and momentarily surrender to its structure. Referencing the evolution of workplace design—from open plan, to pods, to hot desking, sit-stand desks, and now the lean-back workstation—this sculpture considers how workspaces subtly contour our bodies in the name of optimisation and productivity.

Drawing on the aesthetics of ergonomic furniture and industrial support systems, Lean Station transforms the familiar language of the workplace into sculpture. Through participation, viewers complete the work by entering into a “trust fall”, physically placing their confidence in a structure designed to support them while reflecting on the systems that organise collaboration, productivity, and workplace culture.

Presented alongside Lean Station, Plateau of Productivity, Trough of Disillusionment, and Peak of Inflated Expectations (2024) relocate Jennifer Mathews’ earlier sculptural works from the language of the farm to the corporate workplace, circling back to where Mathews first borrowed these concepts (the titles of these sculptures refer to phases in the Gatner hype cycle). Originally drawing on the visual language of agricultural infrastructure to suggest that our human motivations and behaviours are often no more complex than those used to organise livestock, these works now return to the corporate workplace, a place of infinite complexity, yet similar amounts of noxious weeds.
Constructed from industrial steel tubing and hot-dip galvanised, the large sculptural wall works borrow the forms of gates, troughs, and stockyard infrastructure. Positioned within a government and corporate setting, these diagrams of movement, division, and containment take on new meaning. What once organised animals now read as the hierarchies, workflows, org charts and system architecture that attempt to simplistically visualise the moving parts of entire governments and corporate giants.

Each work holds a cast of an hourglass, a familiar symbol of time. Rather than marking the passage of time, the hourglass becomes a tool for optimising human behaviour. It creates a correlation between time and labour and becomes a symbol for the importance of agility in the modern organisation of labour; time-boxing, TTM, billable hours, and the visual management of productivity. Rather than simply performing a measurement, it becomes a tool for directing attention, constraining possibility, and shaping behaviour. Time is money after all.

Represented by

Laila Gallery