Presentation of Work

July Seminar Installation, 2024.

Blonde Ambition Hits the Glass Ceiling, plywood and acrylic paint, 1600 x 2200 x 900mm

Will I Be Pretty? Will I Be Rich?, plywood and acrylic paint, 700 x 1000 x 500mm.

Will I Be Pretty? Will I Be Rich? and 1968 Triumph Herald Convertible, plywood and

acrylic paint, 700 x 820 x 400mm.

July Seminar Artist Statement

These works come from a place of revision, improvisation, and adaptation. Considering themes of broken past promises, unrealised futures and the fragility of inherited narratives they explore the dynamics of navigation in a present so different from the shiny golden version of an earlier time.  By bending, adjusting, and reworking, building the next thing on the thing that came before it, the intent is to remain open to possibility, making the most of what is there to work with today, knowing that circumstances might change tomorrow. Resilience requires both flexibility and strength.

Assembled using temporary connections of notches and tabs rather than glue and nails, each object is held in a momentary state. They contain traces of a former iteration and the potential to be undone and re-assembled. Multiple planes, brought together by tension, negotiation, and cooperation, activate, and support one another by reaching an interim understanding. They resist the idea of being finished, instead being finished for now.

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Will I Be Pretty? Will I Be Rich? 2024, plywood and acrylic paint.

1968 Triumph Herald Convertible, 2024, plywood and acrylic paint.

Blonde Ambition Hits the Glass Ceiling, 2024, plywood and acrylic paint.

Group Critique Notes - 9 July 2024

With Glen, Yvonne, Jo, Amanda, and Nadia.

·        Tortional tension

·        Look like wood

·        Precarious

·        It could spring open

·        Relinquishing control

·        Colour schemes, nostalgia

·        Memory, pastel bathrooms, interior domestic spaces

·        Decorating materials

·        Colour associations – different for others

·        The colour feels slightly wrong in a good way

·        Renovation

·        Where they are situated brings about different feelings

·        The one on the ground is lurking a little bit

·        The titles are interesting – covert feminism

·        It has modernist history but more of a post-modern significance

·        Have you considered joining the pieces together – making one huge piece

·        Spot lighting could give it drama – they already feel theatrical in some way

·        They are both painting and sculpture

·        The colour choices are playful and have an openness

·        Is it just the colour making the associations or the form as well?

Assessment – 10 July

With Sonya and Stephen

It was a bit of a blur and I wasn’t taking notes, so these are the bits I remember.

·        Sonya asked me if a bit from one piece could, at this moment, go into another piece. I’d been thinking about that too. I think it should be able to or at least be more evident that it could. At the moment they can only be transposed if they are adapted in some way, it can’t happen directly. It just has the potential.

·        I was asked about the cultural references in my titles (old song lyrics, feminism, old cars). I haven’t done this in the past so it was questioned. I said something like I wanted to acknowledge or nod to the past in the work, just as a frame of reference, because there are parts of modernism and post-modernism that are being utilized and some being questioned.

·        So we talked about what parts, and I spoke about the way that materials and process, and abstraction were important to the work, but I’m resisting some of those Modernist values like the obstinate object, truth to materials, Utopian ideals, and machine precision of minimalism.

Post-Mortem with Noel – 12 July

• The idea of re-negotiating its own agency, or liveliness in an ongoing way, is “future proofing” of sorts

• That’s why a non-fixedness is open to changing rules

• Flat packing is essential to it – a virtue for the work in relation to agonism and future proofing

• The non-fixedness prevents the work from crossing a line and not going back

But through an agonistic lens

-            How might it travel and move through space?

-            Challenging ideas of value and market

-            How is agonism operative when you see evidence of it in the work?

-            Dismantling and re-fitting

Conventions within post-modernity

-            Late modernist – Serra and Stella

-            Post-modern reaction to that – unmonumental

-            Readymade / found / quotidian

-            Slightism – new boundary emerges

• The large work has awkward relation to both those conventions

• Not having to reconcile or balance out

• It’s okay not to have consensus

• Define a consensus problem in other conventions of sculpture

• Hold the knottiness – agonism

• Flat-pack – territory of mercantile efficiency – can it be used for productive good?

• Democratising art

• Be explicit about how

Further Post-Mortem with Elle and Noel 15 July

• the large scale work is doing something good

• shift in the next work doesn't need to be big - a bit where we see where it was this and it's now that (not necessarily in all of the work presented though)

• lands for now, but an implied future that holds a piece of its past life

• applying the 'flat-pack' term is different to the way it's normally used

• it's a key aspect of the life of the work

• they'll never be this again so need more evidence of that

• having a pool of growth ideas

• cohesive set of ideas - a meeting of thinking and making - keep exploring that terrain

• show more of the agonistic thinking in the work - how is it operative?

• It's showing contemporary sculptural concerns like solidity, confidence, and ephemerality but it's like bombastic meets ephemeral

• craft relationship between thought and work - keep them alive

• putting a heel down in fundamental human thruths

• keep exploring in the mode I'm in now - it's new, fertile terrain - stick with that

• e.g. Isa Genzkin - an assemblage, but it gets to a point where it's fixed - but mine opens up time through agonistic methodology

• Ruth Asawa - All Is Possible - Helen Molesworth's writing - hones in on details to follow a new line. Asawa plays with the continuous line but her whole practice gives alternative approach to thinking this through

• check the values of the installation - keep the tension in the installation and don't be tempted by the evenness of negative space between work

• don't over commit to evenness, balance and the efficient use of space.