Gallery 3
Tara Sao
Anatomical Poems
25 Feb - 8 Mar 2026
Opening night
27 February | 6 - 8 pm
Gallery Hours:
Wednesday – Sunday: 10 am – 5 pm
Anatomical Poems embodies intimacy, corporeality, and vulnerability. The body is abstracted and fragmented into forms that are simultaneously tender and raw with surfaces marked by cellulite, folds, and soft perfection. These ceramic sculptures explore how desire, memory, and identity inscribe themselves into flesh.
The exhibition presents a series of clay reliefs and sculptural vessels that blur the line between figure and landscape. Installed across one wall, the pieces will feel like a constellation of bodies. Individual yet connected, each one holding traces of touch. Each sculpture is a plea to be present, and not be abandoned.
In this space, the audience is invited into the private pulse of their own being. Clay becomes body, body becomes clay. A whisper that we are all human, with the instinct for longing, hunger for connection, and repelling of isolation. Intimacy becomes collective, and public, making visible what is often hidden.
After all, we are all living poems.
Artist Biography
Tara’s work immortalises intimacy, a plea for moments to exist beyond the present. An artist in Naarm, Tara grew up in a culturally rich family as a second generation Australian. The pursuit for perfection was admired and deeply rewarded – as this was needed to survive. With the learnt knack for flawless repetition, Tara’s early craft was custom tableware fuelling the desire for functional art but over years, became hungry for more storytelling and intuitive creation.
Freeing from the confines of technical mastery, and precision, Tara has since leant into uncertainty and clay became a site of play - one that is tactile and instinctive. Shifting from tableware to sculpture, her work now centres on the exploration of intimacy delving into the dimension between reality and fantasy. The body, and nature are sites of intimate exchange and how the process of clay mirrors this intimacy with hands being a conduit between both internal and external worlds. She investigates the body as a site of paradox, where longing lingers.
Sensual, but restrained. Raw, yet intentional. Fragile, and feral.
It demands us to embrace the unknown, holding tension with wanting to feel safe and in control showing how the body is a site of paradox, soft fragility, desperate vulnerability, and strength. Through wheel throwing, and hand building techniques, Tara’s pieces emphasise the fragility of the material but also evokes resilience, and the human spirit to never stop dreaming, and to always keep yearning for more.
Artist CV
2026 | Anatomical Poems, Solo Exhibition at Red Gallery, Fitzroy North
2026 | Slip and Folds, 2026 Small Works Art Prize Entries at Brunswick Street Gallery, Fitzroy
2025 | Cheeky, Group Exhibition for ‘Fitzroy Festivus’ at Fitzroy Public Gallery, Fitzroy
2020 to 2022 | Glazed Tarz custom made to order tableware, Richmond
2019 to 2020 | Studio assistant, Sarah Schembri Ceramics, Fitzroy
October 2020 | Olive bowls for restaurant The Vale, Ascot Vale
January 2020 | Potters in Protest with Piccolina Gelateria, Collingwood
November 2019 | Entrée bowls for restaurant The Vale, Ascot Vale
June 2019 | Cocktail cups ‘Glazed & Confused’ for restaurant The Vale, Ascot Vale