Pieces of Practice: 2012

'The small studio' | Gaffa Gallery

15 - 26 November 2012

Opening Thursday 15 November, 6-8pm

PLATFORM, Gaffa
281 Clarence St, Sydney CBD, NSW 2000
Tel: (02) 9283 4273 www.gaffa.com.au
Open: Mon - Fri 10am - 6pm, Sat 11am-5pm

The small studio was created to house object collections, arrangements and processes, and to be a movable, spatially modest working space. It is a place to hold the material thoughts of practice, and to put them in relationship to changing external surroundings. The small studio marks out an area for practice when space is scarce, and complements the documentation of my larger studio in Pieces of Practice.

The small studio was formed during a cross-art form mentor-ship at Articulate Project Space in Leichhardt, and was made possible by a generously donated packaging crate.

This small studio is actually a smaller small studio than the original started in Leichhardt – unfortunately that small studio was too large for the Gaffa stairway. As the idea behind the studio was that it be easily moved, the studio had to be re-sized. This encounter underlined the relative nature of smallness, the ephemeral nature of my work in general, and the limits that contribute towards defining a practice. So this is the small studio II, and I suppose, now that there are a couple of versions, it is possible there may be more.

This project is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

'Selections from the Egg Room' | Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery

'Shell Egg' Photo: Michael Myers 2011

Contemporary works from Sydney College of the Arts

5th October - 10th November 2012

Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery

Cnr Coff and Duke Streets, Coffs Harbour NSW 2450

Tues - Sun 10am - 4pm

Selections from the ‘Egg Room’ are 5 objects taken from a larger pool of 24 objects. The found objects accumulated in my studio over a period of years, and the eggs grew. The eggs grew from the insides of other eggs. Plaster is a blank, stationary material, and is well suited to capture the shadowy insides of eggs. I’m not sure why, eggs or objects—I simply found myself collecting and making. There is a bower bird down the road who has a lovely collection of blue objects—feathers, bottle tops, plastic ribbons, and I wonder two things: Why blue, and what blue (other than feathers) did they collect before we put our blue plastic bits out there?

I suppose I wanted the insides of the eggs to come alive, for the objects to hatch them, or for the eggs to hatch objects. I wanted stories, weird but familiar object stories. I see them as Frankenstein eggs more that Fitcher’s Bird eggs—if Dr Frankenstein were more concerned with poetic rather than literal transubstantiation (and had a thing for birds).

The eggs and objects are quite delicately assembled. It has always been important for me that the process of assembling be conceptually or poetically exposed; as such these things are held together with mostly wax and string. They are tied, strung, wrapped and pinned, poised and balanced. They are easily toppled. They are precarious, reflective, and a little bit humorous.