Stefanie Petrik - Torn Textures & Hybrid Glyphs

Torn Textures & Hybrid Glyphs: VISPO, Altered Texts & Altered Realities
A Solo Exhibition by ReVerse Butcher (rVb)
Art Space Ballarat | 14 Lydiard Street North, Ballarat Central, VIC 3350

Exhibition Dates: 18 December 2025 – 25 January 2026
Opening Night: Thursday 18 December, 5:30pm for a 6:00pm start
Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 11:00am – 4:00pm

THAT'S A WRAP!

Torn Textures & Hybrid Glyphs has now officially wrapped at Art Space Ballarat.

Thank you to everyone who came through the space over the last few weeks — for the conversations, the questions, the curiosity, the confusion, and the generosity. Exhibitions may come down, but they’re never static, and this one was shaped just as much by the people who spent time with it as by the works themselves.

During my residency, I also unveiled a new artwork from my Circle Series, called "Circle Series: Feminine with Sinkhole" — a slightly tongue-in-cheek response to living and making art in Ballarat. Ballarat is a beautifully Swiss cheese of a town! Beneath our feet are gold rush mineshafts, forgotten tunnels, and the occasional surprise void waiting to make the evening news. Since a lot of my creative journey has involved me contemplating some kind of void or other, it seems fitting that I have settled in a town that could open up and swallow us whole at any time. I also think that's what a life of making art is like, you're constantly tightrope walking the rim of a great precipice, with the best ideas being dangerous, subterranean, and sometimes too big to see until you've fallen in! "Circle Series: Feminine with Sinkhole" sits with that tension: the unstable, the confusion between falling & flying, and the resilience required to live, build, and keep making art in a society, in times, and on ground that has never been entirely solid. That new work, along with documentation from the exhibition, is now available to view on my website.

While the physical show at Art Space Ballarat has now closed, the work continues to loop and mutate. For the month of February, the "Torn Textures & Hybrid Glyphs" exhibition moves from a physical gallery into the virtual world, where it will be exhibited for a month in the Strange Pear Gallery of Fine Arts inside VRChat, alongside a series of live social events with visitors joining in VR from around the world.

Deep thanks to Art Space Ballarat, Creative Ballarat, Kathy Horvat, Tara Poole, everyone who supported the exhibition, and especially to Kylie Supski. Kylie helped install & deinstall the show, served our drinks, organised logistics, explained complicated art and tech concepts to confused people, kept me fed and sane, and quite literally sat in this gallery with me for hours while I worked inside a VR headset. She was the invisible infrastructure behind this exhibition, and none of this could have happened without her care, labour, humour, and belief in me, and my work.

EXHIBITION DESCRIPTION

Art Space Ballarat presents “Torn Textures & Hybrid Glyphs: VISPO, Altered Texts & Altered Realities”, the first solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist ReVerse Butcher (rVb). Drawing on two decades of experimental practice across performance poetry, VISPO, collage, altered books, music, projection art, VR and immersive 3D environments, this exhibition showcases the evolution of rVb’s visual-poetic language from the page to the spatial realm. This exhibition coincides with the release of the companion book of the same name, published by Steel Incisors (UK) and available in both physical and digital editions.

Visual Poetry (VISPO) occupies the charged territory between language and visual art. In the tradition of cut-ups, erasures, altered books, and experimental literary interventions, VISPO approaches text not as a fixed narrative container but as a material that can be dissected, rearranged, inhabited, and rebuilt. These works challenge conventional reading habits, insisting on non-linear, destabilised, multi-sensory engagement.

ReVerse Butcher’s VISPO practice—and the works in this exhibition—push this interrogation further by extending text beyond the page and into sculptural, spatial, and immersive digital environments. Coming from a background in performance poetry and experimental music, rVb has always considered poetry not only as language but as space: a site of memory, dream, resistance, and embodied experience. For rVb, meaning is never static; language are mutable structures we move through.

In “Torn Textures & Hybrid Glyphs: VISPO, Altered Texts & Altered Realities”, rVb reframes the book and the poem as open, contested spaces for agency, rebellion, and aesthetic intervention. These works rethink what a text is and what it can do, presenting language as layered, volatile, and alive—something that can be shattered & rebuilt, collaged into new forms, or expanded into immersive 3D structures that the viewer must explore for themselves.

Importantly, all artworks in “Torn Textures & Hybrid Glyphs: VISPO, Altered Texts & Altered Realities” have been created without the use of generative AI. Every piece derives from ReVerse Butcher’s long-standing practice of manual and digital experimentation, including hand-cut collage, altered texts, traditional mark-making, and sculptural processes built directly by hand and natively in virtual reality. The work reflects a deliberately human, craft-driven approach to visual poetry and hybrid media, grounded in embodied artistic decision-making rather than algorithmic image generation.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

48 Original VISPO Artworks

The exhibition features forty-eight works from the Torn Textures & Hybrid Glyphs Collection, available for purchase. These VISPO works are a hybrid of traditional & digital techniques. These digital prints have been mounted on wooden panels, finished with resin, with each an edition of 1/1.

"Art / Magic", ReVerse Butcher, November 2024

"Cholera", ReVerse Butcher, March 2025

"Command Nothing", ReVerse Butcher, January 2025

Screen-Based and Immersive Works

Alongside the physical works, visitors will encounter screen-based and video artworks derived from rVb’s Virtual Sculptures—figurative digital objects created by hand in Virtual Reality, and using textures painstakingly built from her VISPO pieces. These hybrid artworks reveal how VISPO can be transformed & collaged into into spatial surfaces, and experimental moving image works.

Still from Videopoem of "To Stop Time", from "The Continuous Present", by ReVerse Butcher & Kylie Supski

3D Render of "Rebis", from "The Continuous Present", by ReVerse Butcher

3D Render of "Ouroboros", from "The Continuous Present", by ReVerse Butcher

Still from Videopoem of "No Beginning", from "The Continuous Present", by ReVerse Butcher & Kylie Supski

3D Virtual Sculptures and Digital Landscapes

Working natively in VR, rVb hand-builds sculptural poetic forms using a process she describes as “3D Collage.” Each work begins with analogue materials—hand-painted pages in watercolor, ink, and acrylic on vintage paper—before being digitized, reworked, and transformed into complex 3D textures. These surfaces retain the tactility and intention of their handmade origins while becoming reflective, refractive, and chromatic skins in virtual space.

Inside the VR headset, rVb sculpts as one might draw: gesturally, rhythmically, and with an acute sensitivity to line, texture, and emotional weight. Forms are grouped and textured layer by layer, echoing traditional collage principles where juxtaposition creates new meaning.

Figures and structures are developed through anatomical study, 3D posing tools, and attention to the narratives of symbolic gestures. The VISPO embedded throughout these sculptures emerges from her long engagement with erasure, cut-up, collage, and altered text—language rendered as fragment, glyph, and semantic residue. In this environment, text becomes anatomical architecture, topography, & atmosphere.

These virtual sculptures and digital landscapes extend her performance, musical, and literary roots into a fully spatial, future-facing virtual poetic realm. During the exhibition, rVb will also be present in the gallery on selected days, offering visitors the opportunity to watch her sculpt live in VR—witnessing the creative & technical processes that shape an artwork in real time.

"In a Dark Place", ReVerse Butcher, January 2025

Screenshot from "The Last Stanza", on Viverse. Virtual artwork pictured, feat. "In a Dark Place", ReVerse Butcher, June 2025.

rVb, with "The Last Stanza" playthrough video, on-screen in Arts Space Ballarat, 2025

Artist Background

ReVerse Butcher (rVb) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans performance poetry, collage, altered books, VISPO, mixed media, videopoetry, music, and immersive VR art. Her work investigates how language constructs reality—examining the instability of meaning, the materiality of text, and the borderlands between 2D and 3D environments. Her multidimensional works intentionally bend the nature of text & space, crossing digital & traditional boundaries both technically & philosophically. She will use any medium necessary to subvert reality until it is less dull or oppressive. She currently lives & works in Ballarat, Australia.

ReVerse Butcher, 2025.

ReVerse Butcher, physical vs virtual, 2025.

Featured Publication

“Torn Textures & Hybrid Glyphs: VISPO, Altered Texts & Altered Realities”
Published by Steel Incisors (UK), this new book accompanies the exhibition and charts the evolution of rVb’s VISPO, textual experiments, and spatial-poetic methodologies. It is available as both a printed book and an eBook, and can be ordered directly through the publisher.

https://www.steelincisors.com/

Artwork Sales & Availability

All forty-eight VISPO artworks in the exhibition are available for purchase at the gallery. Select digital works, video pieces, and extended media experiences can be accessed via in-gallery, or online via QR codes.

VENUE DETAILS

Art Space Ballarat
14 Lydiard Street North
Ballarat Central, VIC 3350

Gallery open Wednesday to Sunday, 11am–4pm.

Torn Textures & Hybrid Glyphs | ART SPACE BALLARAT