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