desolate vessels

Rockhampton Museum of Art

23 August 2025 - 26 January 2026
220 Quay Street, Rockhampton, QLD

For this series, Quapoor has memorialised suspended moments within the cyclical timeline of death, grief, and regrowth. While the nine works are devoid of physical contents, they are metaphorically filled with lamentations for personal and pervasive experiences. The vessels feature repetitively hand-coiled and stitched polypropylene baling twine (predominantly salvaged and repurposed) – a material loaded with personal history. Quapoor baled lucerne hay with his late father for many years, so each work is imbued with an undercurrent of memory, loss, grief and labour. This representation of personal grief is also extended to broader reflections on the climate crisis, social division and inequity, contemporary censorship and fatigue.

​While the forms range from the familiar to the abstracted, each symbolic vessel balances desolation with persistence, and heaviness with wry defiance. Quapoor’s titles play with irony and tenderness, turning these objects into containers not just for loss, but for small victories, moments of rest, and glimmers of hope.

Gallery webpage 

​Photograph at top: Danish Quapoor. Other photos individually captioned.