C Change, Art Collective WA, Cathedral Square Perth 6 February -6 March 2020
“One morning in February 2020 I drove to Bunnings and didn't feel safe or brave enough to enter, turned around and came home, resolving to use what materials I had left in the studio to continue on. I started slicing masking tape into thin strips to make it last longer...”
The group of works in C Change were triggered by my experience of the emergence of the COVID 19 pandemic. The earliest paintings have a raw, immediate quality, black paint covering all but a thin network of lines produced by using finely cut masking tape. The placement of the lines was intuitive, eschewing any grid or regular geometry and assisted by using a laser level. Linear elements were also produced in related works; using a circular saw to cut marks into wood and by scoring a black resin coated canvas with a nail.
As the year progressed and the uncertainty around living with covid eased in WA, the paintings also became more defined. Edges became more refined and a compressed sense of indeterminate space began to operate within the paintings. Linear elements resembling rods of coloured light cross over and under each other as they move through a black field, or sit assembled like a sculpture in a void. Sixteen thin vertical canvas stretchers each with a coloured diagonal sit tantalisingly close, approaching, yet isolated from one another.
At this time a number of delicate balsa wood structures, the components painted a different colour on each face, were being constructed using a variety of triangular forms in an attempt to release the structures inherent in the paintings into three dimensional space. Two of these marquettes were realised as floor based aluminium sculptures.
A complementary intervention using signwriting film on the glass facade of the gallery extends the coloured linear elements onto the fabric of the building, and acts as both the threshold into the gallery and the external face of the exhibition. A related temporal intervention on the ground plane of Cathedral Square, Crossing the Square, is intended to define the limits of the paved space in the east west axis.
Thanks to family and friends, Art Collective WA for their advice and support, George Howlett and Paul Caporn for instal assistance, Betty Joy Richards for postcard design and Bruce at Needhams Metal fabrication.
