FERRET 1
A busyness
of ferrets
Dear Ferret artist… the missive into my inbox began …
So issued an invitation to exhibit in a way
that was, well, with all due respect to the creature, ferrety. The FERRET exhibition
encompasses a group of 50-60 artists. Apparently, the correct collective noun
is a business of ferrets, but better
still is the medieval busyness of ferrets.
It’s appropriate as this exhibition brief is for the ferret artist to, like the
animal, ferret-out a space and then
make a work within it or alternatively, to take an existing work into the space
and in the process of installing it, respond not only to the architectural site
itself but also to a busy cyclical progression of artists and works moving around
– both behaviours analogous to nesting within a communal ecosystem. FERRET 1
(26 – 28 January) shares the site briefly with FERRET 2 (26 - 28 January), then
FERRET 2 and 3 mingle (2 – 4 February), and so on, until the final FERRET 5.
Five consecutive Friday openings between 26 January and 23 February will
provide five focal points of convergence between the various groups. In between
openings, artists and works will come and go, like a tide receding and
returning with new offerings. Similarly, for visitors, your experience of the exhibition
will either be of a singular fragment in chronological time, or if you return
provide an embodied experience in which memories of prior works will become overlaid
with experiences of new ones.
Articulate project space provides a unique
and ideal site for this progressive exhibition project. In its conversion into
a white-walled gallery space the architectural relics of its industrial past
have been left intact, even peeled back further, with beams, rafters and
brickwork exposed and co-mingling with its current use. This palimpsest history
provides nooks and crannies and almost guarantees unplanned and chance juxtapositions
between site and works, and also between works. Articulate describes the FERRET progressive exhibition as a
dance, and from the first meeting of Ferret artists there certainly was the
sense of an orchestrated sequence of interactions as we selected, vied, argued,
bargained and collaborated on the spaces we were to successively occupy.
FERRET has had some earlier incarnations. In
a random, yet consistently furry play upon titling, the same exhibition concept
was staged as FAIR ISLE (2014), followed by FERAL (2015). To FAIR ISLE is to knit while shouting, and
there are a number of works that play upon and subvert notions of traditionally
feminine and textile-related crafting in some way. By the front door is Anya
Pesce’s Large Diagonal Fold revisited,
a digital print on chiffon. It is stretched somewhat unnaturally across the
wall, like a dress pulled taut. This tensile action emphasizes the hard
horizontal edge of the image within, a red fold. It is an image of one of
Pesce’s Fantastik plastik works,
making a work that is an image of another work. It references softness and
drapery as ambiguously as it does hard-edged abstraction. In another geometric abstraction
overhead, Angus Callander’s Canopy consists
of lengths of decorator cotton fabric, looped between exposed ceiling rafters,
strikingly and minimally presenting the red/ green/black stripes as a counterpoint
to the hardwood structural elements and driven nails that support its
suspension.
An unstated thematic of transgressive
domesticity[i]
continues. Further along on the ground floor, Michele Eliot’s work, one and another features a pair of
brown-toned tartan handkerchiefs, familiar, ordinary and a staple garment of the
houselhold laundry and iron. In what could be interpreted as a twist upon Kosuth’s
well known One and Three Chairs, here
the representation is direct, omitting the dictionary text and returning simply
to the skill-based: a mimetic wall drawing alongside its subject-object. Eliot
charmingly describes her work as a small
digression in cloth, portraiture, intimacy and abstraction[ii].
The digression continues from hanky to blanky with Deborah Prior’s Long Sleep #1. Here the abstraction
inherent in the pastel tartans of another domestic familiar, a found woollen
blanket, is precisely cut, pinned and partly wound on the floor in a work that comfortably
describes “the imperfect geometry of being human.”
Meanwhile, at the back of the room and
occupying the corner window alcove diagonally opposite to Pesce is a work that
reactivates and revisits the red fold. Anke Stäcker’s work Nach Uns is also a digital print, this time on plastic, an enlarged
image of folds within folds of pink and red plastic – trapping the crumpled,
disposable media in a backlit image that vacillates between the bodily and the
manufactured.
Where this group of works just described softly
deconstruct the material, Diane McCarthy’s mixed media works upstairs take the
tactile, experiential and the textile, (including a powerfully bunched and
coiled calico) back into the formal with a rectilinear triptych-on-the-wall presentation.
The use of fluorescent light spills from and unites
Martin Langthorne and Tim Corne’s collaboration, Colour Score and Star Grid,
facing each other on the ground floor. From across the narrow room Langthorne’s
motif of vertical bands of coloured light are trapped and projected anew by
Corne’s layered and reflective rectangle of scrim and film, creating a light-changing
shimmering curtain for the punctured constellation, the punched holes within
the fabric. A relationship between another pair of artists[iii]
is referenced and presented here as a collusion of coloured light falling upon
and around the constellation of circular voids.
Across and upstairs, systematic patterning is
repeated in other works. As an organic clustering – my own work Inarticulations is a grouping of container-like
objects - paintless paintings huddling beside and from exposed timber beams, deliberately
avoiding the usual frontal and eye-line placement of painting. Directly above
and visible as an echo through the unlined rafters is _____Hours, a spreading net of folded, shaped and taped White Pages:
Business and Government by black3y3dpeac3, a pseudonym used by artist Mel
Baveas. The data within her work is physically compressed, hidden and
transformed within the hive-like construction atop the dividing wall. Both
these works appear likely to spread and increase over the course of their
occupation.
The liminal boundary of spatial enclosure is
defined again with Catriona Stanton’s The
line between Us, a series of primary-coloured containers of air that scale the stairs.[iv]
These porous containers are made from fencing wire, employed not to delineate
boundaries (as fences do) but rather as objects to enfold space. Space as claustrophobic
confinement is addressed in Kat Sawyer’s Pairs,
digital prints that depict parts of human bodies fleshly morphed and
somehow unfamiliar while in the process of fitting through and squeezing into
various holes in materials[v].
Jacquelene Drinkall’s work Emergency Alfoil Anthrop are two video
still prints, silent artefacts of a noise performance in another time and
place, the environment of Witches Leap,[vi]
a site of industrial extraction. Elsewhere, FERRET
artists have utilised and recycled the ordinary, the found and the humble into
constructed works that comment upon our contemporary human condition. William Seeto’s
In a sieve we’ll go to sea is a
spam-derived title which sounds like a fable but functioned as the starting
point for the work, a playful assemblage of repurposed plastics and cardboard.
The sea delivered Rox De Luca the material for her works, found pieces of
discarded, ocean-washed and eroded plastic. From her collection De Luca has
made two monochromatic hanging pieces, Mellow
Yellow and Bluey that emblematise
the paradoxical yet aesthetically lovely tragedy of civilisation’s waste.
Upstairs, a Parramatta Road-facing window
admits the heat of summer, strong urban light and traffic washed sounds of
surrounding industrial Leichhardt. In a cardboard oratory nearby are works by
Kate Scott and Lily Cummins. Scott’s A
not quite unsightly enough ludic object (work in progress) is just that, a projection of play
within a box, a world within the world. Cummins’ work is a drawn echo of this
type of musing. In Last night I searched
for you among the sheets, playful works on variously sized and cut
cardboard are whimsically placed along, on and between a ledge and a white-painted
brick wall, accentuating the process of drawing as a search to pin down the
fleeting and the transitory.
In a final gesture, and back downstairs you
can have a discussion and see a chair plunged head-first into the floor. Emma
Wise’s Housing Project invites
audience participation in a map and a conversation as part of her ongoing
research into accommodation in Sydney. In Retro-fit
Linden Braye seems to pose the initial Dear
Ferret artist position through her sculptural work. While we recognise
elements of a chair, it will not seat us, it appears to be accommodating the stepped
floor, or maybe it’s the other way around. We are thereby
unseated and unsettled.
[i] The writer explored this theme in FERAL,
http://articulate497.blogspot.com.au/search/label/FERAL
3
[ii] Michele Eliot, artist’s statement, FERRET
1 Roomsheet https://drive.google.com/file/d/16vKIa3ClqTB5ETyYvJTWr99Kuux8zkpr/view
[iii] The artists reference
the relationship between John Cage’s musical
composition and Antonín Bečvár’s star charts, Tim Corne and Martin Langthorne, FERRET 1 Roomsheet, Op. Cit.