Forced Rhubarb
Solo exhibition, Tolarno Galleries Melbourne
28 May – 18 June 2022.
The relationship between host and guest is wired with obligation and service. The role of host in everyday life has often felt uncomfortable to me, and yet within my practice it is a method I’ve returned to regularly. And so, I perform hosting at arm’s length, allowing the artwork and the viewer to commandeer the role. In this new body of work, the Linens, I have turned hosting into a solitary method, sublimating the obligation of labour, duty of service, and commitment of time into form.
I have mined a personal archive of colourful test prints, each a fragment of research from the past ten years. Platters, bowls, and glasses are adopted as templates to collage the prints on fresh linen. Piece by piece the compositions are grafted with laborious minute hand stitches.
The Linens employ an inventory of symbols from my own performative and multisensory lexicon. These reoccurring symbols signal the often intangible sensory or ephemeral materials cast within my broader practice; sedatives, yeasts, medicinal plants, and digestive processes. Implicated in the logic of hospitality, the compositions of the Linens are not unlike Spoerri’s tabletop Snare-pictures, but more pointedly entrenched in the labour and service of hosting.
My labour reminds me of the tacky cross stitches gifted to me by my grandmother, or the absurd embroideries created for me by my mother over the years. The Linens too began many years ago as handmade gifts, my debt as guest becoming a lighter load when I can acknowledge and return the service of a generous host.
The floor installation Moviprep stretches across the expanse under our feet in huge loops, one continuous tube made from over one thousand individual sherbet filled straws. Working as quickly as possible, the tubes are cut and joined end to end, the sand-like filling spills from the straw. The sherbet creates trails where the straw sweeps across the ground, tracing the nuances of my hands constructing the work. The sculpture hosts the colour inside it’s intestinal-like body, and it spills them too, creating an expressive platform, accompanied by an overwhelming aroma.
A tube of sugar is designed to pour into our mouth, vertically, becoming an extension of the throat, as much a visual and tactile experience as culinary. The highly processed and artificial product can barely be called food, it is instead a play-thing, created for entertainment, with a nod to nutrition, a bit like fine dining.
- Artist Statement
