e·phem·er·al
[ih-fem-er-uhl]
adjective
1.lasting a very short time; short-lived; transitory: the ephemeral joys of childhood.
2.lasting but one day: an ephemeral flower.
noun
3.anything short-lived, as certain insects.
My work exists for a time and then it is gone again – it’s ephemeral. This is a word I have become closely acquainted with. Rather a nice one, especially in it’s pural form, ephemera.
With my solo exhibition at Rubicon ARI now open, I can reveal some details of the work in progress. I was working with a Casper David Friedrich painting in mind, sloughing off its canvas and crossing the thresholds of the room, with colours lifted from his landscape.
Radius and Extension finally opened last night. Thanks for coming, all who could make it, and if you couldn’t, I hope you’ll pop in to C3 at the Abbotsford Convent and have a look before it closes on August 10.
Space. When given the theme for onefourfour this past month, I thought ‘I’m all over this’. Much of my work for the last few years has related to space, I have been obsessed. I can relate space to just about anything. But it coincidentally aligned with some ideas I have been working on lately around placing my body in the artwork, instead of just focusing on the marks it can make.
An empty wall wasn’t a menacing prospect as I arrived ready to install last Monday morning to install for the Daylesford Group Residency Exhibition, the resultant exhibition from a residency I went on in November last year. Let me share a few work in process images, only a handful because I forgot to take photos as I worked this time.
Black. Actually, it’s very dark grey. I have oft considered it a non-colour, good for outlines and highlights, but my attitude is changing. As you know, I’m all about colour, but this (shade of) black is so flat. It just stops. I mix up glossy colours onto glossy vinyl all the time, but I like the abruptness of this section.
One wintry weekend in November 2013, five artists converged at a large converted farmhouse, just out of Daylesford. Without intention or plan, apart from leaving home behind, they shared the space, pottered, cooked, showed work, took photos, walked, talked, watched, slept, faced off cows, befriended birds, got wet, doodled, played with video cameras, reclined in huge couches, and revelled in the sense of timelessness.
This exhibition is an outcome of that weekend. Using diverse media and methods, including video, projection, installation, painting and photography, the artists in this show demonstrate some of the propositions initiated by such a short incubation in a specific location.
Still finding myself drawn to the idea of painting onto the open landscape, I have been doing some painting on to “landscape” albeit not landscape landscape, not having the elements needed to carry this out full scale (yet! And hey, maybe not ever, since it some of it defies physics), I have been painting into photographs.
I was interviewed on the onefourfour project blog. I’m cross posting it here for you all to see.
How do you describe your work to others?
Describing the visual and experiential in words is an artform in itself, but as an artist, you have to try. Put simply, I make abstract paintings large enough to step inside. The more complex description is that I make paintings directly onto wall, floor and ceiling using my gesture and reach to make a kind of signature of my body across a space, a residue of my body having been present at some time.
This year I was asked to take part in a project with eleven other artists. Here’s the skinny:
‘Twelve Australian female artists have been invited to participate in onefourfour which sees them create one work a month for one year. Every artist is assigned a month to choose a theme that all the artists work to, and the results are posted on this blog at the end of each month. The only restriction is that the work is to be 6 x 6″.’
I was recently commissioned to create a mural on a disused wall of Union House at the Parkville Campus of Melbourne University. The site featured a deep purple wall and a maroon vinyl seating across the front. I was asked to work with both. When a site has offered up colours that I have to work with like this in the past, I have toyed with complementing or contrasting, and with ignoring the colour altogether. This time, I attempted to select a colour palette independent of its background colour but with a different tonal value.