Nicole Polentas
Prothesis | πρόθεσις
2 May – 17 May 2026
Opening event Saturday 2 May 6-8pm
Open Fri–Sun 12–4pm
Request exhibition catalogue (available 2 May 2026)
Prothesis is a multi-sensory exhibition of sculptural trajectories traversing the physical and emotional trauma of loss. The exhibition reanimates the ritual of the Prothesis through a coalescing and abstraction of cultural practices. Drawing from the writings of Hesiod, Euripides, and Homeric floral poetry of death, the objects explore the impermanence of the permanent, evaluating how all living things must also die.
Prothesis activates the unsettling dialectic tension between life and death, body and psyche, the material and immaterial. The work evokes both the notion of fertility and the complex nuances of psychological trauma through a merging of materials, mediums, and processes.
The works address the medical, biological and spiritual relationships to life, death and nature through a repositioning of Greek thought. Material becomes language, inviting the viewer to consider how we can perceive and experience death as an abstracted concept, a material reality. Enveloping death through form, essence, energy and substance.
Amplified through video and sound, Prothesis reorientates the transmutability of life and death that negates the orderliness of our existence.
Artist Biography;
Nicole Polentas is a Greek Australian multidisciplinary artist with a focus on contemporary jewellery and object. Her practice is defined by an ongoing investigation of text and symbolism in order to produce abstracted conceptual works. Combing diverse mediums, the objects activate a dialogue grounded in the artist’s personal and cultural experiences. She has received a Bachelor of Fine Arts, a Masters of Fine Arts and a PhD in 2015 at RMIT University. Nicole has successfully exhibited both nationally and internationally including Melbourne Now’13 at The NGV, A Fine Possession: Jewellery and Identity at the Powerhouse Museum and Schmuck in Munich. Nicole has held solo shows in Australia, Europe and the US. She has won numerous awards and her work is included in collections of the Powerhouse Museum, Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery, The Bluestone Collection and The MacMillan Collection at RMIT University, the Museum Espace Solidor in Cagnes—sur—Mer, and the Helen Drutt International Artistic Studio Jewelry Collection at the Illias Lalaounis Musuem in Athens.