Last weekend and artists' talks - Sunday 13 December

Too bright for our infirm Delight & Solo

Open 11am-5pm Fri - Sun 13 December

Articulate began a year-long celebration of a decade of exhibitions and projects with the opening last weekend of Too bright for our infirm Delight, a new single-installation by Sarah Woodward in the project space, and Solo, an exhibition upstairs and in the backroom, of documentation of past single-installations in the project space.  Read more about Articulate's decade here.

CATALOGUE

The second weekend of artists' talks is

2pm Sunday 13 December 

• Solo artists:  Jenny Brown, Chantal Grech, Michele Elliot/Louise Curham (Slowing Down Time), Lesley Giovanelli and the Splinter Orchestra.

Splinter Orchestra,  Splintstallation 2017 2020

Jenny Brown Slow hope: becoming coronavirus 2020. Photo: the artist

Jenny Brown Slow hope: becoming coronavirus 2020. Photo Peter Murphy

Jenny Brown Slow hope: becoming coronavirus 2020. Photo Peter Murphy

Chantal Grech Residues 2020

Lesley Giovanelli  Maybe Coming 2019

Slowing Down Time (documentation) 2020 (video clip here)

L: Alan Schacher Dividing/Line (2018) 2020; R: Perrine Lacroix NO WAY 2020

L: Wendy Howard The Bronze Age Part 1: Travels 2014 2020; R: Beata Geyer ObliqueXT 2020

L: Chantal grech; R: Kenneth Lambert Ph Peter Murphy (video clip here)

Ciaran Begley & Merran Hull Still Morphing 2020 Ph Peter Murphy

Richard Kean Aural Solo 2020  Ph Peter Murphy

Slowing Down Time 2014-15 2020  Ph Peter Murphy (video clip here)

This project is supported by funding from the Inner West Council

Conditions of entry to the exhibition and talks:

There are limited places in Articulate due to COVID restrictions. Please be prepared to wait if it is full when you arrive.

Please stay at home if you’re unwell.
Stay at home if you’ve been in contact with a known or suspected COVID-19 case.
Please wear a face mask in Articulate.
Use the hand sanitisers provided at the entrance to Articulate.
Fill in your contact tracing information on entry to Articulate.

Maintain 1.5 metres distance from other people.

Articulate celebrates a Decade with Solo opening Saturday 28 November

 Open 28 November - 13 December 

Hours Fri-Sun 11am - 5pm

Opening event Saturday 28 November 1-5

A5 catalogue of texts

Solo shows documentation by artists Ciaran Begley and Merryn Hull, Elia Bosshard, Jenny Brown, Alison Clouston and Boyd, Beata Geyer, Lesley Giovanelli, Chantal Grech,  WeiZen Ho, Laine Hogarty, Wendy Howard, Richard Kean, Perrine Lacroix, Kenneth Lambert, Kathryn Ryan, Alan Schacher, Slowing Down Time, Splinter Orchestra and Helen M Sturgess of their single-installations made at Articulate over the last decade. It will be shown in the mezzanine and backroom spaces at the same time as the new single installation, Sarah Woodward's Too bright for our infirm delight is open in the ground floor project space.

The two exhibitions begin our year of celebration of the ten years of exhibitions since Articulate was set up in December 2010 to focus on spatial and experimental artwork. Articulate plans these exhibitions as the first of several across 12 months. This first exhibition stresses single installations because we think that artworks' connections with their locations are likely to be emphasised when there is one work in one space. Articulate has also supported single installations in particular as they are also often more challenging, at least financially. 

The past single-installations  documented by Solo artists are shown via images and text below:

Ciaran Begley & Merryn Hull Still Morphing 2020 (3D render, right side view)

Our collaborative work Still Morphing, 2020 may at first appear to go against the fundamental intent of the group show Solo. Rather, we propose that it is the process of collaboration in the conceptualisation and making of this work, that enables the work to present a unique response as documentation of a single installation previously shown at Articulate.

 

The collaboration results in the opportunity to morph two practices into one artwork. As its title suggests, Still Morphing, 2020 presents as the ongoing, expanded documentation of earlier individual works. It focuses on recreating the experience of previous work by engaging composite parts of both our practices notably light, colour transparency and movement.  Our aim has been to work at a smaller scale while playfully engaging with the recreation of parts of works that we have previously shown at Articulate, in order to invoke the past while fully engaging with the present.

 

The concept of the work is a small light-based wall sculpture in perspex (Ciaran’s origami works) that sits behind a series of light-weight hanging screens (Merryn’s transforming screen works).  Colour is introduced through floor-based lights that project onto the perspex origami work and onto the hanging screens. The potential for movement that is a characteristic in Ciaran’s origami work is expressed within the new work through the viewer’s capacity to transform the work through their own movement. Light as the embodiment of the viewing experience, reflects onto the screens in multiple ways.  As the viewer changes their location, the origami work is seen to come alive in its ongoing capacity for transformation.

 

We gratefully acknowledge the opportunity provided by Articulate to make and show this work and to explore alternative materials and methodologies. In this, our collaboration has fostered a unique swapping of artistic ideas:  Ciaran has used perspex, a material often favoured in Merryn’s work and Merryn has through the use of wires and hanging forms, opened her work to the greater potential for movement illustrated in much of Ciaran’s work. The work is specifically sited at the end of a view-line from the open door in the studio and beneath roof beams that provide anchors for the hanging screens thereby facilitating the natural and miniscule movements of light across the screens.

 

Rather than accepting the limitations of the photographic image, the hanging screens are the living documentation of the new origami work while concurrently capturing the essence of earlier individual works.

Ciaran Begley and Merryn Hull 2020

Elia  Bosshard Binary Field 2019. Photo: the artist

Binary Field (the meeting between two spaces) is a monolithic, whole-space installation. A long path cuts through diagonally, dividing the room into two parts. Essentially one line, it is an active object that functions to vertically distinguish between high and low space.

Where is high and low? There is no one point when the space transitions from being above to below you. That meeting point depends on one's relationship to height. The walk from one end to another takes time, through which the place of being shifts. At what point do we perceive that our relationship with the path has changed or are aware of it changing?

Through the documentation my hope is to convey the experience of this work. The shapes and angles that are created where installation meets architecture and light. The material’s colour and texture. The strung tension pulled between each end of the building. A sense of its large-scale presence and how it might guide us physically and perceptually through the space, perhaps becoming aware of aspects we never noticed before. 

Elia Bosshard 2020

eliabosshard.com

Jenny Brown Burnt Stars (detail) 2015

Slow hope: becoming coronavirus

The process of documenting my solo show Burnt Stars (2015) was used as a wayfinding device to this new work Slow Hope, which draws attention to how national cultural policy planners working to polarise communities in conservative revolutions, do not share responsibilities for what may be the unintended consequences for the biosphere or people who follow their advice. As a future map work, Slow Hope does this by extending and updating one of the throughlines of Burnt Stars, whilst nesting it in a way to explore artist responses as resistance to this set space.

Slow Hope incorporates some of the walk-through video documentation of the presentation  ofBurnt Stars at Articulate and excerpts from the screen works shown in it, made as part of a DAAD scholarship in 2012. The work brings together two political positions in Beuys’ fictional landing on Heidegger’s hut. The event can be understood as catalysing Beuys’ determination to set about ona lifelong journey to use the art field to reinvigorate a socialist trajectory, by  challenging and ‘crashing down on’ what both he and Germany lost to Heideggerian informed Nazism. Beuys’ journey of redemption embraced the importance of linking German political thinker Hannah Arendt’s revolutionary horizon as part of action for the common good.

Slow Hope uses Burnt Stars’ Beuys’ parachute and Nazi fighter plane crash landing footage  withthat of Heidegger in his hut who is explaining away his Nazism in the essay he is typing, The Question Concerning Technology.1 The documentation becomes a new platform to branch out and more deeply show how Heidegger’s work has a peculiar intellectual partnership between the German radical right of the 1920s and the post 1968 generation2, which I assert still provides fertile ground for this same post-1968 generation in America now.3 This is indicated in Burnt Stars by the low-hanging red-blood bulb glow that in this new work shines on the dead forest of bombs atop cracked Schwarzvald (Black Forest) mud fields (in conversation with the nationalist slogan Blut und Boden - Blood and Soil, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and climate change), near Heidegger’s Hut. Read more.

Jenny Brown

jennybrownjenny.com/

Alison Clouston & Boyd, Dust, 2011 (Photo: Alison Clouston)

Alison Clouston and Boyd

“Dust”

Articulate project space, Sydney 10–19 June 2011

We parked the ute and trailer on Parramatta road. A load of buckled steel, soot black and bright orange new rust, topped with delicate tent structures of willow, supple, green, red. Fragments of drawings, still legible in variants of black, blew down the street.

The space was perfect for our needs. The gracefully fire-distorted roofing iron of the bush studio was hoisted into the void near the noisy street. To the sound of Boyd’s “pitched breath’ on Contrabass clarinet, you were drawn inwards through “rooms” paved from debris of shattered artworks, sheltered under the emergency housing made from the new sprouts of willow (maligned trees, yet the source of magic, regeneration and healing; aspirin comes from it). In a piece he wrote after his mother’s death in the year following the fire, other instruments joined Boyd’s clarinet – a descending scale played at different tempos, all eventually arriving together at their deepest note. Through the darkness under the stairs, the visitor picked their way towards the light at the end of the space. Here in the brilliance of daylight, laptops ran our new website, and the walls held the almost forensic photographic investigation of the burn-site.

For the performance, the space excelled again. Visitors on stairs and gallery could witness two levels of performance, me in a pool of light on the first floor joists, the musicians in another below. As they improvised around a pile of ruined tools, I made a rope from withies of green willow, winding it around me till it enclosed me like a nest. I began to unwind the rope over the edge, down, down to the audience and the musicians and the wreckage below, all unseen to me in my eerie. It spiralled onto the tool pile, and just as the musicians intuitively reached an end to their work, by pure coincidence I also reached the end of my rope. I dropped its tail end over the edge. The audience laughed in surprised pleasure and release. Something we hadn’t fully understood in the spontaneity and improvisation of the unrehearsed performance: It was a ritual letting go.

– Alison Clouston 2020

Link to video and essay by Annee Lawrence

http://www.burragorang.org/dust.php

Beata Geyer OBLIQUE 2014 

BEATA GEYER 

OBLIQUE  16 May – 1 June 2014 

obliquExt  28 November – 13 December 2020

OBLIQUE 2014

(adjective): əˈbliːk/ 1. neither parallel nor at right angles to a specified or implied line; slanting 2. not expressed or done in a direct way. 

Site specific installation project based around the concept of form-ation, an idea of an active and mobile form that not just is, but rather does, in the context of architectonics of gallery space. The project is realised through the process of planar, spatial and colour manipulation in various acts of designation, accumulation and  negotiation that will continue throughout the duration of exhibition.

obliquExt  2020 

For this documentation project I am planning to create a small site - specific response using a residue of objects and materials from OBLIQUE 2014 installation.

I consider this to be a new work, an annexation of a new space with a simultaneous extraction, hence the new title obliquExt.

Website : www.beatageyer.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beatageyer/

articulate497.blogspot.com/search/label/OBLIQUE

Lesley Giovanelli Coming Going 2017 (Fabric, used clothing, dowel string) 

Lesley Giovanelli 

Coming Going 2017 (Fabric, used clothing, dowel string) 

Maybe Coming 2019 work in progress studio and Articulate

When I installed ‘Coming Going’ in Articulate it seemed to be operating as a transitional space and the installation was leading into something which should have been but wasn’t there. 

Transitional Spaces lead from one place to another and prepare you for a change. They can also lead from one state to another. The enclosure of a temple in Bali surrounds the inner sanctum. Normally quiet and semi secular, it becomes active during ceremony with ritual, dance, music and chanting. The inner sanctum is awakened, the worshippers are ready to enter and the gods arrive to take up their places. The meander line leads initiates to the Bora ring where they will undergo certain rites and emerge changed forever. More prosaic is the verandah which leads from the street to the house and from the house to the garden. The foyer in a hall and the overture in a symphony work similarly.

Another example is the procession, a travelling space gaining energy until it arrives at the site of the main act. I decided to treat my work as a parade not a procession, in which viewers and fabric hangings participated with movement backwards and forwards through the space. It still felt unresolved. The installation could either remain transitional and have another act or it could be reworked to create a new installation, an environment, the space you arrive in. Both would be fine. Subsequently I have started reworking the material on the environment option. ‘Maybe Coming’ is a work in progress undertaken in my studio and Articulate during a short residency.

Lesley Giovanelli 2020

lesleygiovanelli.com

Chantal Grech Points of departure 2012

          Residues 2020; reflections on Points of departure 2012

The installation, Points of departure, begins with a reading to the empty space. Various aspects of the architecture, a door, a window, a wall, become sites for a reading from El Iskandariya — Alexandria, a story about the search for home and the nature of belonging. This is done knowing that those who will hear this reading will be some distance away, in another city, another country (a video and other material is being sent to the Documentation Festival in Lodz). It then becomes a kind of displaced reading - so the emptiness of the space isn't emptiness, it contains a voice that seeks to connect to the space around it and there is a listener, but the listener is distanced, just as we are when we leave home or are dispersed, then the voices that we carry within us seem themselves far away. This is the first gesture, a way of breaking the anonymity of place, and so a relationship begins.

Each point where a reading occurs is then marked with a white square, which in turn signals a site for a work to be installed. The installation occupies the whole space from the front to the back window. At the end of the exhibition the tiles are the last remaining pieces and are collected in reverse order to the initial laying out.

 

In Solo a marking of the space is repeated using the same white tiles. They each signal a residual fragment. Two fragments– one (used in the 2012 work), names the city of Alexandria in four different languages, the other, a sign, is composed of the colours of the Egyptian flag (prominent in the Arab Spring) –are placed at opposite ends of the upstairs space separated by a void but in direct line of sight of one another repeating the metaphorical use of the downstairs space in the original work. A third residue is a line of text from an Arabic poem that speaks to a particular place. 

I think that space is organic, a living entity of its own, critically dependent on how it is treated. The residues in this show are displaced both in time and space. A new element, colour that reference another land, has entered – colour that is dependent on context for its perception. Another juxtaposition, another way of looking.

Solo: Installed text: from a poem; I remember having loved'  by Hasan Abdullah;

      materials; perspex, gouache on board, vinyl

Chantal M Grech 2020    http://chantalmgrech.com/

Wei Zen Ho from t h e  s u b t l e  b e i n g s  2018  (Ph Vsevolod Vlaskine) 

Social Function and Animation of Whole-Space

My 2018 performance-installation, t h e  s u b t l e  b e i n g s was a response to a research trail about bobohizans in the villages of Sabah (Malaysian Borneo) and LenDong rituals in Hanoi (North Vietnam).  

I used both floors considering the social function of each space as far as the boundaries of a performance-installation can be extended in practical terms, and as far as time is concerned.  The social function of space is akin to the creation of cultural spaces, and the re-thinking of spatial demarcations.  For example, the visibility of a body to slowly appear from the basement stairs, creating the atmosphere of ‘emerging from somewhere else’, and of another realm; and how the phenomena of body-postures and movement could take place in a spatial zone where most of the audience would NOT consider comfortable to step across.

Another element of the whole-space canvas is movement and flow. The possible entry and exit points for a group of bodies, in relationship to a body or a few bodies in space. The performing body and the audience body became blurred at many moments.

The third element is spatial-time relationship i.e. a group of bodies standing still while one body moves, or moving as an entire group.  This spatial-time dreaming process is helpful when I am attempting to evoke something of the past into the present space, through the body engaging with the sculptural landscapes.

The consideration of whole space performance creation also takes into account the psycho-emotional responses of multiple viewing points (and therefore physical distance) of the audience; how the audience interact with each other, the performance and installation.

The documentation process focused on the four performance sessions in video and stills, following the movement of the audience and performance.

For Solo, I have chosen to re-place a leather costume with antenna-like horse hairs that was glued onto my abdomen and chest in the audience’s presence during each performance.  

This costume was made with the help of Katja Handt; a performance costume that can potentially transform a body’s gait, postures and footwork; to imagine how the subtle beings might have moved when they were first sighted in the mangrove jungle of the Rungus people in Sabah (Malaysian Borneo).  I explore how the costume could suggest the possibility for movement or animation in this re-exhibition process.  The location is significant in that the Rungus people often conducted their dance and invocation rituals on a raised platform, specially built and in close proximity to the roof apex of the ceremonial house.

WeiZen Ho 2020

weizenho.com/work-avenue#/thesubtlebeings

Laine Hogarty, AAAAAAAAH! 2013 (found timber, orange plastic found building)

The freedom of a solitary conversation with the space to arrive at a singular gestural response, felt exhilarating.

I began by observing the architecture, its materiality and the height and expanse of the vistas. Any which way you frame the space the structural beams offer their own historic conversation. I arrived at the concept of creating a map of the buildings beams on the floor as a flattening or collapse of space and time.

The aesthetic diversity of using reclaimed wood responded to the sense of time resonant in the beams. As the work evolved it completely covered the floor, forming an obstruction, with many exposed rusty nails and bolts still intact. My background in wayfinding design made me consider public access and safety.

I responded by introducing flouro orange hazard strips that also mirrored the beams above at either entry point to the gallery. Feedback from artist Leslie Giovenellie, highlighted that having the tape at either end of the installation looked like two works or approaches. I resolved the work by highlighting the stretch between the beams that is perpendicular to the main direction of the beams. A central wider orange vinyl strip provided a singular passage where visitors could walk a straight line without obstruction.

AAAAAAAAAH!
Materials: Reclaimed wood used in boat building, adhesive vinyl, building.
Date: Jan 2013

AAAAAAAAAH explored the concept of restricted passage through space. A mirror image of the structural beams were laid carefully on the gallery floor using reclaimed timber from boats built and restored in Putney in Sydney. The work appeared to only be on one plane, however its dialogue extended vertically through the space. The volume of space was realised when the viewer made a link between floor work and the buildings structural beams. The beams offer structural integrity, allowing the visitor to traverse the space safely. By contrast the reflective floor work was decorative and had no functional purpose. Instead it created an obstruction that forced the viewer to adjust the way they negotiated and traversed the space. The AAAAAAAAAH! moment happened when the audience decided to engage the space despite the obstacle of the artwork.

This project was kindly supported by the Australia Council's Art Start Grant 

HAAAAAAAAA!

Digital protection  Stop time animation as a continuous loop

Materials: Reclaimed wood, cloth

Date: Nov 2020

HAAAAAAAAA! Presents a reclaiming of the wooden offcuts as they make their way from the floor to the beams again. After months of recent restricted access through COVID, this playful stop time animation elevates the wood to a reimagined purpose and agency. The HAAAAAAAAA! moment offers a sigh of relief as obstacles are removed.

  Wendy Howard  The Bronze Age Part 1 2014

The Bronze Age Part 1: Travels  2014

The original installation consisted of 7 “ships” approximately 6x3x4 feet, sailing in a line from the door of the gallery to the back. The end walls were covered with a mural on paper in black ink.

Out of an interest in archaeology and the speculation about objects whose purpose and meaning have been lost, I focused on ship imagery in rock carvings from the Bronze Age. Ships provided a starting point but my concern is not with representation.

My interest is in the basics of sculpture, how to make a plane into a 3D object. What happens when 2 edges meet? How does this meeting distort/shape/move the plane? What is the minimum action or force necessary to effect this change? And once this is done, how does gravity act upon it and how does the resultant object want to rest on the ground?

Here I have reproduced the 7 ships – 2 copper, 3 brass and 2 bronze – in paper and thread, and the mural is reproduced in miniature in a small book I made at the time.

Wendy Howard 2020

Richard Kean Aural Labyrinth 2013 Photo: Jo Rankine
see other images here

Richard Kean Aural Solo 2020 

Leather Bag, wooden fixtures, steel wire. 400x1800

The work I installed within Articulate in 2012 was titled Aural Labyrinth and I felt quite honored to do so. The idea for this project was to create an aural string installation that used the gallery space as a resonator. To do this, wooden fixtures were built which were placed strategically in prime resonant areas of the full length of the walls, rafters and the stair but also by intuitive reaction to the relationship of silver wires that were forming in the space. This so called labyrinth became a navigation of visual and aural potential within the architectural structures of Articulate. 

One outcome of the work was to invite the audience to participate in playing the aural strings. A collaboration with the artist Weizen Ho was performed integrating the movement and aurality of the human body with the space and installation. After, the entire audience of all ages played the strings and explored and shared the constellations of different aural potentials that the strings formed in their relationships to each other and the space.

Another outcome was the quiet realisation that each aural string inherently has its own nuanced and highly complex identity that is understood through its sound, its timbre, as it is know. This individual quality of each string is because or many elements such as variations in material, length, and tension but also where the string engages with the architectural elements of the space. In effect the string is inflected with both the materiality and spatial dimension of the space. This will inherently change with the amount and movement of people in the space that changes the character of the sound of the strings as heard through the atmospheric volume of the space. But what is more, each hand that plucks the strings does so with their own nuanced character, no matter how subtle. The installation thereby allowed a fluent translation between the solid and void, material and spatial, aspects of the architecture but also the audience as individuals and it represented this fluency in the sound the string makes when plucked.

This work for Solo presents the bag that all the fixtures from the show have been stored in since the deinstallation of Aural Labyrinth in 2012. The work has not changed but is rather an iteration of the process on a smaller scale.

Richard Kean, 2020

Perrine Lacroix Displacement 2017

NO WAY 

Perrine Lacroix 2017

 

 

NO WAY is a slogan that Perrine Lacroix read and heard in the press during her residency at Articulate in January 2017.

He denounces the immigration detention camps on the island of Nauru off the coast of Sydney. Exploited by various colonial companies (Germany, Japan, Australia) and then by the inhabitants of the island, its phosphate ore deposit ensured a very high standard of living for almost a century. Failure to anticipate the depletion of reserves, coupled with reckless policies, plunged Nauru into bankruptcy and political instability from the early 1990s.

Trying to diversify its sources of income, Nauru engages in money laundering, the sale of passports and now in the detention, in unspeakable conditions, of thousands of asylum seekers turned back by Australia.

 

NO WAY is a specific installation by Perrine Lacroix for Articulate, composed of a polyethylene film, a fan, and a video.

A large plastic curtain shaken by the wind opens the frame onto a square of light. A shift takes place between the sculptural aspect of the sail inflated by the wind and its pictorial escape towards the window.

As with Alberti, this window does not open onto nature but onto history: “I first trace on the surface to be painted a quadrilateral of the size I want, and which is for me an open window through which we can look at history (historia). ".

The introduction of the veduta, in Renaissance painting, is not intended to see what is seen simultaneously from within, but rather to excite the imagination of the spectator and remind him that the scene is not being played out in a closed place but against a background of the universe.

It opens up other perspectives, here on that of the evasion of these migrants in search of a future and freedom, detained on the island of Nauru like cattle, merchandise.

Ironically, the story - which has long forgotten the aborigines (from Latin aborigin, meaning "from the origin") - says that the "first" Australians were for many prisoners brings from Europe.

 

The fan also refers to a line by the mayor of Nauru in an interview who boasted of taking good care of his inmates thanks to the air conditioning.

In other words, they have air conditioning but not the freedom.

 

In the introduction, screenshots, digital research checkers that appear just before the appearance of the images, become like flags, banners denouncing this situation.

 

The Pas Perdus video places us in the posture of a voyeur trying to guess the comings and goings, presences marked by the rhythm of the footsteps on our heads. The opalescence of the glass slabs creates a halo, a wadded rim whose trace is immediately erased. Tiltings and subtle movements cause a slight dizziness, an impression of loss of reference.

Perrine Lacroix 2020

Kenneth Lambert Mirage 2020 HD video (1080 x 1920 px), Stereo sound, 20min, 1/3

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Mirage

This work is the dematerialisation of the documentation gathered from my installation titled De-interlaced, presented in Articulate project space in 2018. The original piece comprised of 6 suspended aluminium frames, wrapped in mylar and finished in polyurethane metallic spray paints. De-interlaced was intended to be a reflection on our growing interdependence on technology and the discriminate effect our interactions have on the world around us.

The idea of documentation is often a mirage, existing virtually as a series of pixels with a digital space. Further, the intention of documentation is to capture salient imagery that conveys the spirit of the installation and hold in stasis a nostalgic memory of its success; it can never be the work. This concept of false memory inspired me to degrade the original work with a methodology that connects it back to its origin.

In this experimentation, the documentation is systematically encrypted and fragmented using material sourced from audio recordings and video footage captured within the exhibition space over four weeks. Its dematerialisation into an abstracted digital landscape reflects my ongoing process to work with disintegrated matter, which in some way reflects the human condition.

Kenneth Lambert 2020

kclart.com/work

Kathryn Ryan Booklet of Drawings documenting 'Pieces of Practice' 2011

I remember being given the chance to work in Articulate, it was of many opportunities that Articulate gave me over the years and I’m very grateful for their support. So much of my work, and my confidence to show work, came from the people and space of 497 Parramatta Rd.

So firstly I’d just like to say thank you, and congratulations for reaching the milestone of 10 years. 

When I got to Articulate in 2011 I didn’t have much with me. I had two carry bags of small things that were easily moved on public transport. It was always very hard for me to identify the materials of my practice but with time and absence I see now that they were objects of proximity and convenience, there were so many practical considerations that defined what I chose: Money, opportunity, portability,and a certain material flexibility to sympathise with the spaces I worked in - which for most of my practice happened to be non contemporary with natural elements.

All these restrictions were freeing in a way, whatever I chose had to be chosen and that’s what I had to work with. All these objects, discarded from old houses, living in op shops, and littered along streets, form a line along a network of busses and trains that encompass a space that was entirely personal and yet also shared.

I never tried to make these objects make sense or to find out what they meant, I just enjoyed the challenge they presented to surprise me, and hopefully others. It was very much like working with words and finding their poetry. Anyway, I remember that Articulate as a space had a lot of rough edges. There were cracks and bricks and wood and natural things left undone. And without these I don’t know that I could have made anything without becoming lost. I needed these areas as points of departure - and as an end point to the tether the journey of these objects.

At the end of my time I drew each miniature installation as a way of keeping it and making something I could own. 

I’ve recently moved houses and I had to decide what would happen to all these objects that have been hibernating in my cupboards for the last few years. I put them in huge dark weatherproof boxes under the house, but I brought up my drawing and booklets. This wasn’t just practical (there is no space for them up here with me) because we make space and clear space for what is meaningful to us. And without some kind of art friendly space these objects don’t really make much sense, the booklets do - they catch a point in time when I was making something, and to have had that freedom to make something strange with untethered things was so wonderful.

Kathryn Ryan 2020

See other documentation of Pieces of Practice 

 

Alan Schacher DIVIDING/LINE 2018 (photo; Peter Murphy)

DIVIDING/LINE

A line cuts both-ways, space is always contested. The dividing/line separates groups : spectators/witnesses : a face-off. My interest was to dissect the social norms and expectations of spectatorship and the politico/social responsibility of the artist. Where does the dividing/line lay between the whole and its parts?

Is a line drawn (as : in the sand) threat or challenge? limit or demarcation? bloodline or barrier? Enter by the backdoor : intimate friend or surreptitious visitor ?

Enter by the front door : invited guest or official inquisitor ?

Borders, domains, territories, conflicting interests and patterns of usage compete for attention. Whether whole or single space, it offers neither carte blanche nor terra nullius.

I approached the gallery as a domain occupied by artists within the larger territory of the immediate vicinity.

Transposing notions of migration frontiers, diasporas, regulation, forced separation and division of communities was my modus of installation.

I set out to problematise, conflict and conflate, causing inconvenience, consternation and confusion, undermining habitual convenient flow. 

The problem with a whole space is that you cannot claim free reign over its entirety. 

To re-order the space I considered access, entry and exit, door and stairways, reversing and questioning. Cutting into the space I interrupted its regular patterns and confused visitors by making it appear that the venue was closed or under renovation.

Fencing is a ubiquitous mundane material, a hoarding or security or safety device, so how can it be considered art?

The division of space demarcated a redirection of those who entered.

Starting with a simple string line on the floor, then a suspended plastic sheet on an overhead line, each side occluded from view, referencing East and West. From upstairs, not part of my whole-space, a privileged overview.

Straight and upright vertical fencing, progressively leaned, collapsed and careened as suspended barriers traversed the space, threatening to fall, obstructing passage, no longer a division as much as a cobbled together ghetto, a favela signifying mismatched use and history. Employing hired and scavenged materials, I completed the work with distorted spoken audio suggestive of an Orwellian/ Huxleyan dystopia, a border control scenario from which one might not escape. My continuous presence as security guard or overseer reinforced the allusion to domination by an authority. Participants observed those on the other side as differentiated, divided by mis/fortune, beliefs, practices and purpose. Sleeping niches, milk-crates and stools, little safety flags and stacked orange base-weights completed the Folly.

Alan Schacher 2020

alanschacher.net

Splinter Orchestra, Splintstallation July 2017 (detail) 

Splinter Orchestra was founded in 2001 to perform radical improvised music, although initially in fairly conventional performance contexts. As the group has developed, our performances have stretched-out both temporally and spatially, and opened out to the world. The distinction between ‘performance’, and ‘inhabiting place’, have become harder to define. Our practise has tended to shift away from staged musical performance, gravitating towards what might be described as ‘altruistic’ active listening practice, where we try to be inclusive of and care for all the agents in the phenomena, be they human, other animals, or the physical world.

In 2017, Splinter began to enter the world of what we call ‘splintstallations’. 

Our first was at Tempe Jets (where we play weekly). Members created their own self-playing instruments and sound devices which were dispersed around the many rooms of the building and incorporated into the group’s play. Unlike many sound installation exhibitions, the individual artworks were created to coexist with each other, to create a multiplicitous immersive spatial ecology.  

We went on to inhabit Articulate for a two week residency in July 2017. This splintstallation was a combination of sounding sculptures, audio and visual installation, and spatial music performance that explored the acoustic resonances and ambient sound environments within and without Articulate’s project space. The public were invited to engage through active listening and also playing during opening times. Specific performance events were also advertised.

Day to day, moment to moment, the work and its components evolved, sounding differently as we made adjustments and additions, and interacted with and around them. The space was transformed into a beautiful unfolding ecology of gadgets, kinetic sculptures, switches, branches and leaves, audible snacks, speakers, cassettes, Parramatta Rd, crickets, records, strings, skins, biscuit tins, movement and humans. 

Once again, this splintstallation was a collection of individual offerings that became inseparable from a whole work. 

We have since created three more splintstallations: as part of Intrasplinter at Down Under (Freda’s) in late 2017, Splinterverse for the NOW now Festival 2018 and Splinter Magic at Tempe Jets in 2019.

Many of the objects, sounds and ideas that appeared and developed in Splintstallation at Articulate featured in these subsequent projects and continue to have a life in the group’s work. 

For Solo we share with you: some images taken during the residency by members of the group and Gary Warner; an audio recording that features the installations in action one afternoon, plus moments of the whole group playing together in the space; as well as this written reflection.

Splinters

November, 2020

www.splinterorchestra.com

Splinters involved in this project included Prue Fuller, Laura Altman, Melanie Herbert, Bonnie Stewart, Andrew Fedorovitch, Jim Denley, Cor Fuhler, Peter Farrar, Solly Frank, Mimi Kind, Shota Matsumura, Axel Powrie, Tony Osborne, Sonya Holowell, Rhys Mottley,  Luiz Gabriel Gubeissi, Adam Gottlieb, Alexandra Spence, Weizen Ho, Jack Stoneham, Charlie Sunborn, Marco Cheng, Hannah Kim and Ruby Everett. 

http://articulate497.blogspot.com/search/label/Splintstallation

Louise Curham, Michele Elliot, Sue Healey, and Jo Law, Slowing Down Time 2014-15

Slowing Down Time (2014 - 5) started with the premise of just that: how to slow down time. This project consisted for four exhibitions and the works were manifestations of dialogues and conversations between four artists: Louise Curham, Michele Elliot, Sue Healey, and Jo Law. Each artist works with different media­ materials including textiles, sculpture, choreography, and moving image, but they have in common an attentiveness to the materiality of everyday life. 

We began our first iteration at Articulate project space in March 2014. This ‘whole-space artwork’ started with studies, traces, and interventions to the space made by one artist (Louise). This work then evolved over the exhibition period with each subsequent artist who occupied the space and responded to what existed there. Jazz luminary Alister Spence joined Louise for the very first week of this experiment in March 2014. In our October 2014 exhibition, we invited audiovisual artist Peter Humble and dancer Martin del Amo  to participate in these audiovisual and performative dialogues. For us, these events became about creating a thinking-doing space, where we came to make together, where we shape experiences, where we invite others to dialogue. 

 

Why this way? Our departure point was a 2013 residency at Bundanon Trust, when we talked, walked, and thought about what it means to make art collaboratively. We wanted to experiment with working together and wondered what that meant. Our method of working together draws on lineage from improvisation in choreography, music, and audiovisual performances. We asked: what if rather than separating our creative processes into studio work and exhibition, we come together and create in the same space iteratively?

This is an unpredictable process. It demands participants to listen, to respond intuitively, and be influenced by the ‘push-and-pull’ of other forces. Encouraging the audience to return to the space at different times also contributed to a collaborative experience. Collaboration is essential for artists whether they work by themselves with materials, or with others. 

We hope that Slowing Down Time has shown ways where artists are no longer the mythical ‘lone genius’, but an instigator of conversations. By bringing her diverse responses in consonant with what surrounds her, the artist invites others to participate in creating a collective and reflective space where time is slowed down.

Louise Curham, Michele Elliot, Sue Healey, and Jo Law 2020

https://artofslowingdowntime.tumblr.com/

http://articulate497.blogspot.com/search/label/Slowing%20Down%20Time

Helen M Sturgess Dermis 2019

Helen M Sturgess  

Dermis

17 May – 2 June 2019

I arrived on site three days before the opening with a large pile of dressmaking patterns, several big balls of string, rolls of waxed baking paper, lots of eyehooks and a large tub of wood glue – along with plenty of tools – and set to work. The next day I brought my sewing machine, a camera, tripod and AV equipment, and worked on. 

I utilised points of attachment that remained from past exhibitions, and also the interior architecture of this former auto workshop, to explore and build on the palimpsest of marks and incidental ‘memorabilia’, scars and patched repairs that others have left behind, creating a delicate, intricate web of string. As I went I filled in shapes that occurred within this web with sections cut from the translucent pattern papers, delicate relics of the era in which I grew up. It was a very meditative process. 

A vintage sewing machine case that turned up in a throw-out on the street behind Articulate became a central point of the installation, a point from which the chaotic web appeared to spring.  

As the web grew, the AV elements of the installation slowly came into being too. I created a paper loop of the instructions that pepper the patterns, interspersed with the word ‘breathe’. I filmed my machine sewing round and round the loop, then looped the film. I’d set the machine to sew at a rate that brought the word ‘breathe’ to mid-screen at the rate of anxious breathing, while industrial chatter of the sewing machine added a kind of white noise to the installation.

On another screen, the machine sewed round and round another endless loop of paper seam lines. 

Friends and family came along and helped, contributing hours, food, poetry and companionship, but mostly I worked alone. Having the whole space to myself felt like a treat. 

Helen M Sturgess

http://articulate497.blogspot.com/search/label/Dermis

This project is supported by funding from the Inner West Council

Conditions of entry to the exhibition:

As there are limited places in Articulate due to COVID, please be prepared to wait if it is full when you arrive.

Please stay at home if you’re unwell.
Stay at home if you’ve been in contact with a known or suspected COVID-19 case.
Please wear a face mask in Articulate.
Utilise hand sanitisers provided at the entrance to Articulate.
Fill in your contact tracing information on entry to Articulate.

Maintain 1.5 metres distance from other people.