Impossible Guest, NERAM, Armidale New South Wales, 2018.
Impossible Guest
Solo exhibition at New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale, New South Wales
16 Feb – April 2018
Curated by Rachael Parsons
Impossible Guest presents two bodies of work by Willing that were developed during her residency at New England Art Museum in December 2017. During this residency period Willing engaged in broad experimentation, exploring local food culture, a landscape that provides a range of edible and medicinal plant life and various processes to transform plants, confectionary and even alcohol into new aesthetic forms that go far beyond their original, functional context. In some instances, it is almost as if a kind of alchemy has occurred, where cheap, commonly found and banal items find new and heightened value as Willing deconstructs and expands their physical properties.
In Warm light (no. 1 – 5), Willing has designed a series of glass straw sculptures. Their formal shapes are composed by assembling together multiple anatomic forms that are at once symbolic and literal vessels that reflect the physical process of consumption. Contained within each straw are liquors from Dobson’s Distillery, an important fixture in New England’s foodie culture that celebrates locally made spirits, wine and crafted beers. To fill the vessel Willing sucks at one end of the straw drawing in the liquid, at once performing and disrupting a straw’s intended function. Instead of using the straw to drink the alcohol, Willing aborts the action and traps the liquid within the vessel, forward movement stilled and held in place by gravity, creating a visual tension. The colour of the liquors finely shifts, affected by the room’s light and casting subtle reflections that interact with the shadows on the wall.
Untitled (orange, red, blue), takes as it’s source material the MaltoMilk biscuit. The repetition, scale and high production value of the print has a certain quality associated with advertising practices and Pop Art. Made using the biscuit like a printer’s stone, Williing uses crayons to create rubbings that capture the texture and in some instances the recognisable branding of the familiar snack food in an abstracted composition. The process of then digitising and increasing the image’s scale captures in detail the materiality of the making process, the waxiness of the crayons and texture and placement of the biscuit, whilst also allowing for a production line reproducibility that denies the hands on an imperfect original printing process and aligns instead with the mechanical production used in making a packet of MaltoMilk.
Both bodies of works are ephemeral, Untitled (orange, red, blue) installed using wall paper to ensure a flat and plastic finish will be destroyed in the de-installation process. While the glass vessels of the straws in Warm light (no. 1 – 5), may be re-installed in a new space, the exact configuration of the liquid will always be different in each showing. Their temporary nature mirrors food’s ephemeral quality following a similar cycle of making, consumption and destruction.
- Wall text, Rachael Parsons
