Kerin Casey, September Seminar Installation View, 2024.

Kerin Casey, September Seminar Installation View, 2024.

Kerin Casey, September Seminar Installation View, 2024.

Kerin Casey, Girls Can Do Anything, 2024, plywood and acrylic paint.

Kerin Casey, Blonde Ambition Hit a Brick Wall, 2024, plywood and acrylic paint.

Kerin Casey, Ladies, a Plate, 2024, plywood and acrylic paint.

Kerin Casey, Ladies In Waiting, 2024, plywood and acrylic paint.

Artist's Statement

These works come from a place of revision, improvisation, and adaptation. Considering themes of broken 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 former iterations 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.

Girls Can Do Anything, 2024, plywood and acrylic paint.

Blonde Ambition Hit a Brick Wall, 2024, plywood and acrylic paint.

Ladies, a Plate, 2024, plywood and acrylic paint.

Ladies in Waiting, 2024, plywood and acrylic paint.

Notes from Critique 1

Thursday 19 September

Elvis, Ashley, Yvonne, Jo, Karen, Kerin

·        The two large works facing off, tension, agonistic

·        Volatility, can these forms be trusted?

·        Sky pattern/texture on the blue one – feels like sky

·        Scale, overhanging, casting shadows

·        Feeling of being enveloped.

·        Monumental quality and fragility of the pink work

·        Touching the floor. Powerful feeling. Curves look effortless.

·        Curves contrast with angles. Graceful. Confidence.

·        Tension, negotiation and femininity

·        Frozen in time feeling. Feels like a never-ending moment.

·        Something in the middle of momentum.

·        Multi-purpose elements, a sense of the incomplete

·        Flat colour vs sanded, mottled

·        Sense of flux. Seeing raw materials.

·        Confidence / not trying hard / seem effortless

·        Work on the floor – another sculptural form to not make so flat?

·        Modernist deities (feminist)

·        Contrast between fragility and strength

·        Delicate pastels contrast with monumental feeling

·        Ikea on acid

·        Have you considered other materials? Rounded edges? Projecting? Tony Oursler

·        Artificial curls. Stand-alone work – is that an option?

Notes from Critique 2

Thursday 19 September

Noel, Elle, Sonya, Manny, Kayla, Mike, Phong, Amanda, Kerin.

·        Floor work implies its finished because of the title

·        Temporality connection

·        Not fixed adds tension to viewing

·        Looking for offness intrinsic to objects – undeniable prodding

·        Serra but not

·        Scale good

·        Tension best in the two largest works

·        Viewer is pushed to negotiate through the work in the install

·        Counter to curvilinear

·        Elle wants to see the brick one descend to the floor – full over hang

·        Weakness productive

·        Manny - The large scale makes them feel more like paintings in that they play with composition, form, colour and surface

·        Sonya - Dessemblage

·        Mike - Precarity suggests motion and character

·        Caught in time but could expand

·        Elle – if they are paintings implying motion, how can we then talk about them as paintings?

·        Sonya – surface as document

·        Manny – were a flat surface made into a curve, but still retain planar qualities

·        Mike – wants to return to original state

·        Elle – building, architecture, cars, boats – associations with constructed forms

·        How to relate to suggested excess of materials

·        Noel – surface as skins

·        Caravan ply – 1950’s/60’s feel in colour and material

·        Amanda – connects colour to title

·        Have a persona to them because of titles

·        Titles stable but work unstable

·        Noel – is there an ironic dimension to the titles?

·        Psychological temperature of gestures

·        Pushing against character as title

·        Elle – titles reflect the things I’m confronting in the work

·        Mike – feminist element in titles – quality of gender

·        Implied reference to feminism

·        Noel – am I adhering to values in those titles

·        Mike – they imply character

·        Sonya – the Blonde Ambition Hits a Brick Wall title isn’t a readymade piece of language

·        Titles confusing – cultural memes, titles not working maybe because they’re not located in the present?

- online layers of performative feminism

-        can bring in film and tv?

-        Noel – formal quality in the work – monumentality, modernism

-        They do feel monumental but not grounded

-        But undermine that in provisionality

-       confidence in gesture, taking up space

·        Sonya – Judy Millar and Mata Aho

·        Sits in interesting place

·        Pink one is the most successful

·        Noel – the central core/spine is working well

·        Areas for Growth?

·        Flat work – speaks to process but is that successful?

·        Mike – a series of work going from flat to constructed?

·        Elle – but they already do that and that would do a disservice to the contextual idea

·        Amanda – the flat pieces looks like they’re supposed to make one work

·        Sonya – don’t need the flat pack work – bit contrived

·        The misfits are active

·        The tension of the wall work is released by the flat pack work

·        Noel – a couple of productive gestures could be enough for one work

Notes from Critical Reflection with Noel

Saturday 21 September

·       The work is arriving in a good place now

·        Taking up space is confidence of the gesture

·        Large scale gives impression of only just being in my control

·        Exceeding boundaries

·        The work reflects the idea that identity is in a constant state of being formed

·        Not an intrinsic quality

·        Titles need work – they anchored in an era too much

·        They need to be more nuanced

·        Maybe titles need to be gentler

·        Too tied into the problematic history of gender politic

·        Expectation of undermining them

·        Need to get the pitch/temperature of the titles right