when the air is dry

try this today.

“there is sweat in between”

Roni Horn

Paired Gold Mats, For Ross and Felix (1994-5)

“One mat is placed on top of another. From between them, firelight glows. It peeps and seeps out from the edges. The light is the gold reflecting off itself. Here is the metaphor for intimacy. Here is the eroticism, the splendour and mythology of gold.”

http://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/14/roni-horn/images-clips/

http://www.womenandperformance.org/uncategorized/between-the-ground-and-the-sky-daniel-sander.html

pens

 

Grief is desire in its purest distillation.

-Anne Michaels, ‘The Winter Vault’

 

 

drill hall

I have some work up at the Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, until September. Please drop by, if you like. I am showing two older works – ‘A Collection’ and ‘Star Map’ (which is now part of the Drill Hall collection).

I’m lucky to have had my work around 2 wonderful exhibitions, Kensuke Todo’s survey show and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s exhibition ‘Story Tellers of the Town’.

I didn’t write about this earlier but I thought perhaps I should put a few words up.

Various constellations.
Constellations, or the idea of constellations, recur from time to time in my practice. They can be anchors of meaning, which, depending on one’s ability to read, can easily appear indifferent, random, arbitrary. They can mark a glimpse, a moment in time in a continually shifting situation. Constellations are about relationships. It is this that we remember, that allows us to give meaning to points in space. The stars are a distant, compelling focal point. The universe is vast and endless. It seems the furthest thing away from the things that we are able to touch and grasp, yet I am drawn to the constant possibility of accessing or discovering this vastness in the tiniest things, the things closest to us.

Each of these holes projects a pinhole image of the sun.

(Star Map, 2009)

(A collection, 2006-14)

The collection is not really a conscious constellation, but of course it becomes one. I like being able to show this piece. It started off as a collection of two kinds of intimate objects – soap slivers and old erasers – that wear against our existence, and whose forms were created as direct ‘imprints’ against our hands, our bodies, our creations and words. The negative space against our lives. The stones arrived much later, to close the rhythm of these groups of things. There was just this emotional response that I had when I was thinking about how these soaps and erasers were arranged and found my collection of various stones. There was something in the contrast that struck me then, the sensation of a stone being dragged against the skin or across the page, and the way in which we are positioned somewhere in some kind of scale of time and softness or durability or permanence. At some point, all of my work is related to time, scale and relationships. And perhaps, also, disappearance. Emergence, and obliteration.

things that happened earlier

Hey, I had a show in June at ANCA Gallery, called “Sum of Parts”… here are some install photos from that show.

If you’d like to see the work close-up, you can find them in the page ‘Images of work’.

Thanks to Rob Little for the photography!

even the most solid of things

If these ideas seem strange, remember that we have only five senses with which to find out about the world around us. When we feel a stone, we can tell whether it is rough or smooth. But we don’t get any ideas of the motions and commotions of the atoms in the stone. When we look at a person, we get some idea as to their shape, size, and colouring. But we don’t see, feel, or hear what makes them a live person. So we musn’t be surprised when we are told that the seemingly solid matter in our world may be closer in nature to light than it is to the things we consider solid.