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
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