I grew up in
Newcastle, we used to buy prawns from the fish co-op, I called it Funnel Web
Fisheries but it was Red Funnel Fisheries. That’s how I learnt the term malapropism.
Words are
wonderful. It is not the misplacement of words but rather the playfulness of
words that seem to have inspired the title
Ferret for the third in a series of rolling exhibitions, Fair Isle 2013
and Feral 2015, with openings for this show on the 26 Jan, 2, 9, 16 and 23 Feb
held at Articulate project space in 2018.
It is an
exhibition that offers more than the sum of its parts, as audiences that return
for each new exhibition carry the immediate memory of the last show. And these
returning viewers are part of the process of exchange: work A was there where
work B now stands and in relation to work C and work D and now in the context of X and Y and so on.
In this
first iteration of Ferret, the breadth of intellectual enquiry is far ranging. It
includes but is not limited to the environment, the body, shelter, mark making,
painting, the stars and is delivered through various art forms again including
but not limited to: installation, video, photo media, interactive maps, objects,
sculpture, digital image, and residual trace.
It is above
all, the use of largely everyday
materials and the manner in which they transcend their regular use that seems
to both unite and fracture our expectations.
Deborah
Prior’s work Long Sleep#1 2018 is a
standout example of this being able to be read as a poignant response to our
human need for warmth and shelter and yet it is rendered unable to do either as
the woollen blanket has been cut with clinical precision, pinned to the floor
with most of it rerolled into two balls and displayed with all the formalism of
high art. (1)
Michele
Elliot’s work entitled One and Another
2018 seems to resonate similar ideas of ‘intimacy and abstraction’ bringing
together watercolour, a cotton handkerchief and mapping pins to convey the
everyday and even portraiture in what the artist describes as ‘a small
digression’. (2)
Diane
McCarthy’s Untitled also deals with
trace and cloth; in this case the residual charcoal marks that leave their
trace across the three related but separated works on paper made for this
show. It is a departure for those
that know McCarthy’s work, which has long been concerned with skill rather than
chance, as she is a highly accomplished draughtsperson.. The canvas plait that
is bound to the paper in the third of these works seals the relationship of drawing
and painting as inextricably bound together.
Beeswax, copper
tacks and gesso are all associated with conventional support for oil painting. However, Lisa Sharp
repositions these materials as independent of their painted surface reformed as
‘inarticualtions’ (paint less paintings)
2018,attached like little nests to the supporting beam of Articulate
gallery’s wall, reminiscent of paper wasps’ homes writ large.
Lily Cummins’
Last night I searched for you among the
sheets 2015-2016 again employs traditional art making materials but here
she uses found cardboard as her chosen surface. This series of works were
installed along the a ledge and side of the wall as if feeling their way in the
gallery space - perhaps in search of you the viewer.
Space (and the
concepts surrounding the poetics
of space) offers another connecting thread or means to discuss the disparate
works by a number of other artists in the show.
William
Seeto’s In A Sieve we’ll go to Sea is
a wall work that seems to sum up all our fears for the future. It comprises repurposed objects, packaging
and corrugated cardboard. Here, the uncertainty of the world we live in with a
clock that ticks ever closer to midnight with only makeshift solutions, is
captured in this aesthetically pleasing yet equally disturbing piece.
Sitting
adjacent to Seeto’s is Anya Pesce’s
work Large Diagonal Fold revisited 2017,
a digital print on fabric of her own Large Diagonal Fold in perspex. Strangely, jet shaped in its two
dimensional form, it seems to hover in another dimension of travel. Bright,
bold and dynamic there is something slightly melancholic about the work, perhaps
caused by its relationship to the real and its simulacra.
Space travel
might be seen to connect to Jacquelene Drinkall’s work Emergency Alfoil Anthrop , 2017 a still print from a video work
wherein tin foil and the tin man from the Wizard of Oz are conflated in
response to environmental issues of oil and coal.
In Anke Stäcker’s
Nach Uns , 2017-2018 – which google translate as ‘after us’ in German, the work itself provides a
sense of zones of uncertainty, presenting an image of what appears to be a
visceral interior space but is in fact a digital image of plastic on plastic.
Catriona
Stanton’s work The Line Between Us, 2018
uses fencing wire, material usually used to divide us, to create netlike structures that scale the
gallery stairs asking “ is what divides
us from within or without” (3) While the work The Hours 2015 -2018 delivers the
Business and Government white pages transformed into a web like structure by
the artist black3y3dpeac3.
For Kat
Sawyer, it is the
physical squeezing through small spaces in her set of actions, Pairs 2012 reminded me of Sydney’s ever
increasing housing crisis is not unlike squeezing into smaller and smaller
spaces. Housing is the ever present topic of conversation in Sydney and Emma
Wise’s work The Housing project 2015-
plots conversations that map Sydney’s accommodation, in what must seen as ‘shelter
politics’ as housing becomes increasingly difficult for most people to secure
in this town. Angus Callander’s Canopy 2018 hangs from the
rafters of the gallery both a festive banner and an ephemeral shelter ,
touching again on both questions of painting and modernism, and the relationship
of viewer and the work.
Linden Braye’s
work Retro-fit, 2018 gives us a work in the language of the ‘reno’ appealing to our
preoccupation with architectural space at the same time it plays to the
question of aesthetics and space.
There is a
level of playfulness in many of the works that belies their seriousness and the
often difficult issues they address.
A good
example of the serious/playful juxtaposition is Kate Scott’s work ‘Not quite unsightly enough ludic object
(work in progress) 2018, while Rox de Luca’s works Mellow Yellow 2018, and Bluey 2018 are both visually appealing
as chains of colour and comforting
in their order and arrangement. However when we realize that they are collected pieces of plastic
- this comfort doesn’t fall away per se but
they unsettle us. It is as though they embody our complex relationship to the
material in both its allure, and usefulness and at the same time as the scourge
of the earth that chokes our waterways, floats as the giant garbage patch and
is ingested by us as well as all things the earth.
Everything
in heaven and earth comes full circle in Star
grid, 2018 a collaborative work by Tim Corne and Martin Langthorne, that
maps the exhibition itself and the artist’s works in relation to one and
another with reference to heavyweights John Cage and Antonin Becvar’s own
celestial atlases. Their Colour Score
2018 was ‘the show stopper’ of this incarnation of Ferret bringing clear
triumphant stillness to the exhibition.
Articulate’s
Ferret and its past incarnations could be seen as a kind of Mobius
strip. Like topology itself; it turns and return on itself through time and
space - altering, fluid and continuous. And it’s a great way to kick start the art
year with work by a multitude of artists over five separate and yet connected
shows.
Ferret
I Friday 26 January – Sun 28 January 2018
Isobel Johnston 2018
1.
Artist’s
own statement links the work to sleep studies and the imperfect geometry of
humans Room Sheet
2.
Artist’s
statement in the Room Sheet
