Look closely now - Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery 26 October - 9 December 2012

take some tea II, 2011-2012

pears soap, tables

 

 

 

 

 

Handwise V

the balancing act I, II, III, 2012
wire, carbon paper, graphite paper, cotton, matt board, display domes and table

This work was exhibited in the Handwise V exhibition at Newcastle Art Space gallery from 9 - 26 August 2012. 

the balancing act reflects the balancing act most of us face in contemporary life and our struggle to achieve an equilibrium between work, life and family. There is deliberate tension created within the work. At any stage the chair stack could collapse or topple, the work is fragile, yet resilient at the same. 

The humble stool is a re-occurring element in a number of my works and represents time spent labouring and creating within the domestic environment. 

the balancing act II, 2012
wire, carbon paper, cotton, matt board and display dome

the balancing act II, 2012
wire, carbon paper, cotton, matt board and display dome

the balancing act III, 2012
wire, carbon paper, cotton, matt board and display dome

Intersection

the spaces between, 2011

Pears soap, acrylic and tables

Courtesy of the artist

Intersection

Soozie Coumbe, Jane Farrah, Stephen Garrett, Niomi Sands and Gillean Shaw

6 January - 12 February 2012 | La Trobe Visual Arts Centre

About the exhibition

Intersection is a description of the overlays that are found between one object, or material, and another. It is the layering of both meaning and physicality with each of these artists exploring their personal responses to this proscribed concept.

Soozie Coumbe explores the natural environment and cultural landscape through the use of found and natural objects. Jane Farrah re-contextualises historical and cultural objects to create a mnemonic link to the past. Stephen Garrett explores trace, shape and structure through transcription and measurement. Niomi Sands uses found objects as a reference point to imply associations related to memory. Gillean Shaw uses materials of the everyday as a referent, and as the physical material for representations of public and personal archives.

Intersection

Museologist Krzysztof Pomian once noted that objects in collections are prized for their capacity to produce meaning rather than for their usefulness and concluded that what links them all is “their ability to be involved in an exchange process between visible and invisible worlds.”

Expanding on this, sociologist and renowned comentator on the museum, Tony Bennett, declared further that in public museums, objects both comprise a “domain of the visible” but also “derive their significance from the different ‘invisibles’ they construct and from the ways in which they mediate these to the spectators, or [as he says]...” what can be seen in such institutions is significant only because it offers a glimpse of what cannot be seen.”

In other words, museums construct both visible and invisible stories about life and the universe by the way they place objects in particular sequences or divisions - Bennett’s point was that all this points to another order of invisible story - that of “the progress of civilisation toward the Enlightenment”.

This form of museum practice is one of the ways in which we construct memory, in social, cultural and political terms. However, as everyone is well aware, it is selective and continually open to misinterpretation or reinterpretation. Artists, too, are concerned with the construction of the visible and the invisible.

In Intersection, the works all variously address issues of memory - in the fragments we carry with us from our personal histories, to those we associate with places and spaces we inhabit, to the collective memory of nature in the human psyche, to the archiving of family and human concerns in the legal system, long also a taxonomic practice of the museum.

Yet Intersection is also about the layering of meaning that occurs between the physicality of an object, its very materiality - its visibility - and the meanings, the invisibility that attaches to those materials. The very nature of the material itself conveys layers of significance embedded within it.

The artists each have their own recollections and associations with the physicality of their works. Each of us also bring our own associations to these materials; many personal, some more universal. What a successful marriage of this physicality and the layered ideas and associations brings is the possibility of a kind of transcendance.

In art, it’s about a power to redeem life or experience - a role usually assigned to religion and philosophy - not always fashionable in our materialist society.

An experience is transcendant when you are able to perceive a wholeness from all the scattered layers - it allows a visual and conceptual dialogue with the ideas and nature of the work. In other words, it contains the possibility of making the invisible accessible through visible form. 

In Intersection, this moment of transformation is the very raison d’être of the show - exploring the possibilities of these layers of form, memory, physicality and ideas - that potent intersection of the visible and the invisible - that requires an exercise of imagination and recollection on our part as well of the artists.

Dr Angela Philp

Overlay

‘take some more tea’ 2011, Pears soap, and cotton, dimensions variable,

installation images, Paper Plane Gallery, Rozelle

This exhibition presents a series of new site specific works by Soozie Coumbe, Jane Farrah and Niomi Sands. Overlay is the intersection between one material or object and another. It is the layering of meaning and physicality. In this exhibition each artist explores Overlay through the use of tactile substances. Soozie, Jane and Niomi each express a sensitivity of materials that become integral to the premise discussed within their work.

All three artists have a background in Fibre textile and studied Fine Art at the University of Newcastle. Currently all artists are based on the Mid North Coast, and regularly exhibit in galleries in the Newcastle area and Mid North Coast.

The below essay was kindly written by Curator Gillean Shaw for the exhibition.

Overlay

'Overlay' is an apt textual overlay for three artists’ exhibitions that are all held within one show. Soozie Coumbe, Jane Farrah and Niomi Sands are women who live and work among the best Australian coast and hinterland – that of mid NSW, and whose lives and practice overlap and are overlaid and intersect, materially, conceptually and geographically.

The environment they share has a profound influence on their collective aesthetic and this visceral sense of the physical, natural environment is distilled into work in which the various mediums that are used are adapted to make stories, tell tales and describe moments through an atavistic sense of objects, objects that are often from the domestic world and are constructed from the natural.

In so doing, everyday objects such as paper, cotton, wool and soap become the protagonists developed and crafted for these stories. By virtue of the finesse with which each artist manipulates these every- day materials into elegant ephemera, they become the tangible evidence of transitory moments.

Soozie Coumbe uses paper as a soft and pliable medium, the repetitive forms and repetitive stitches echo patterns found in the natural world, her group of work “Transitory Moments’ gives a sense of the familiar but on closer inspection of material an uncanny disquiet is balanced with a deep respect for the craft and status given to paper as three dimensional form.

The past as a shared cultural memory is another link for these three women – visual representations of the cultural environment and the cultural objects of domestic life are worked with traditional skills – the vitality that is inherent in each piece comes through its construction, which defies these tradi- tions and often the materials themselves.

In Jane Farrah’s work this familial domestic environment is acknowledged as a marker of life’s circular trajectory in ‘Turning Circle’. A return home has inspired a return to process and a focus on skill and material as a childhood wardrobe is replicated five times as a fulcrum to the past, to stories and also as a marker of the future. The natural environment is again reflected here, a contrast of pure white wool and root structures that embed both the work and the maker to the environment of her youth.

Domestic objects are again a familiar for these women – all have used functional objects in their prac- tice from tools to shoes – from objects of comfort to objects of work. The objects are used as markers of memory and new constructs and meaning are given to their personal material culture.

‘Take some more tea’ embodies for many of us a shared notion of a particular time of familial history, a time when tea was a social facilitator, an instigator of family congress, a medicinal brew for healing hearts and minds. Niomi Sands has explored the archaeology of her Grandmother’s home and her extraordinary collections – in this case a bounty of tea cups. Carved in Pears soap this work becomes a total sensory experience of childhood as that recognizable scent confirms the fresh, the clean, the comfort.

The strength of this exhibition ‘Overlay’ is its sense of the personal as it becomes a collective cultural experience – the forms, material and scent trigger our own personal archives, our own histories, our own place.

Gillean Shaw July 2011

A likely story indeed!

'A likely story indeed!' 2011, Pears soap, cotton, and pins, detail images

'A likely story indeed!' 2011, Pears soap, cotton, and pins, detail

'A likely story indeed!' 2011, Pears soap, cotton, and pins, detail

'A likely story indeed!' 2011, Pears soap, cotton, and pins, installation view, John Paynter Gallery

This work was created for'Happily Ever After: alternative destinies in contemporary feminine narrative', an exhibition of artists’ books at the John Paynter Gallery, Friday 10th – Sunday 26th June 2011, and Artspace Mackay, Friday 22nd July- Friday 28th October 2011, curated by Caelli Jo Booker and Helen Hopcroft.

The work A likely story indeed references the fairytale 'Alice in Wonderland' by Lewis Carol. Over the years 'Alice in Wonderland' has provided inspiration for many of my works and A likely story indeed continues this fascination .The work is inspired by childhood memories of creating my own fairy take books out of anything I could get my hands on, including the left over plastic stubs from shopping bags, this was a favourite activity on shopping day!

Fore more information about the exhibition please visit

http://happilyeverafter11.blogspot.com/

A moment in time

'anyone for tea?', 2011, carved soap and cotton, installation image,

Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery

'anyone for tea?', 2011, carved soap and cotton, detail, installation image,

Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery

'time (passing time)', 2008, carved soap and cotton,

installation image, Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery

'moments in time', 2011, carved soap,

installation image, Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery

'a moment in time', exhibition installation image,

Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery

'a moment in time', exhibition installation image,

Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery

The A moment in time exhibition at Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery combined a selection of recent and new works that all explored ideas of memory. Below is a wonderful essay by Diana Robson written especially for the exhibition.

A tale began in other days

A tale began in other days,

When summer suns were glowing –

A simple chime, that served to time

The rhythm of our rowing –

Whose echoes live in memory yet,

Though environs years would say ‘forget.’ *

It would be too simple and in fact misleading to say that the work of Niomi Sands takes us ‘for a trip down memory lane’, though this may well be where the journey begins, it is unlikely, this is where it will end.

Like Alice, as she steps through the looking glass into a ‘seemingly’ familiar room, with everything in its rightful place, though in reverse, of course, Sands objects are immediately recognisable – bobbins, cotton reels, a locket, a tea cup and saucer. The familiarity is comforting and the memories do come to the surface.

But things are never quite as they may appear to be, as Alice soon discovered, on the other side of the looking glass. Or rather, not as they should be, perhaps not as you remembered them. The locket, the bobbin and the reel of cotton, just as you remembered them, but now ‘larger than life’. A stool, a piece of clothing, a set of keys, frozen at a particular moment in time. But which moment? Void of distinguishing colour or markings, it makes the remembering just a little more difficult.

Is the memory real or is it just our imagination? What role does memory play in our lives, how does it shape and form who we are and who we may become? These are some of the many questions at play in Niomi Sands exquisite and beguiling objects.

Come, hearken then, ere voice of dread,

With bitter tidings laden,

Shall summon to unwelcome bed

A melancholy maiden!

We are but older children, dear,

Who fret to find our bedtime near. *

Diana Robson, February 2011

* excerpts from, Child of the Pure Unclouded Brow, introductory poem, Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll