USEFUL - 5 January to 31 March 2013
HERE & NOW - CARRIAGEWORKS
In 2013 Carriageworks presents HERE AND NOW a series of four projects curated by Liane Rossler. HERE AND NOW offers new commissions and limited edition works by Australian artists and designers which are only available at Carriageworks.
The spirit of HERE AND NOW is artist-driven and experimental. Each of the four projects is organized around one concept and will be shown in a custom-made space. The four projects for 2013 are USEFUL, TOTES, LUCKY and STAR.
Artists include:
Alejandro Nam
Dale Hardiman
Dear Plastic
Jane Polkinghorne
Julia and Ken Yonetani
Lana Alsamir Diamond
Leah Jackson
Matt Fearns
Sarah Goffman
Sassy Park
Sionemaletau Falemaka
Supercyclers
Tin and Ed
Vanessa Holle
AN Blocks by Alejandro Nam
AN Blocks contain a secret compartment to keep your [somethings]. They are hand made from wood off-cuts which would otherwise be thrown out. Three rules helped focus the project:
1. Minimal machining & finish
2. Attractive as a stand alone object
3. Requires an alternative functional value.
All ANBlocks are hand-made and no two are exactly alike. Cutting and drilling form the product nucleus of the block from which different series are born through adaptation of the material process. It is an ongoing exploration with a focus on saving excess & waste material. Currently being developed for adaptation are marble/stone, metal, glass & paper.
OFW POLLY BY Dale Hardiman
OFW (organic food waste) Polly combines the composted and dehydrated food waste of Melbourne’s notorious Victoria Market and the material waste from the original Polly home-wares collection. The completely bio-degradable pieces are each uniquely shaped due to the inconsistent nature of the creation process. The food waste is folded into the polymer then hand moulded over forms, leaving one side with a perfect finish and the other dictated completely by hand moulding. OFW Polly is a series of garden planters, designed as semi-permanent objects that once broken down will allow the food waste to become apart of its environment.
PAPER CRYSTAL WATERFALL MOBILE by Dear Plastic
‘Dear Plastic" was born on the 26th June 2009. It started with our blog looking at ideas for recycling, upcycling and ways to love our organic natural world. In 2010, we began market stalls and workshops selling handmade organic bags and milk carton paper making kits. Our workshops centred around upcycling and we taught children and adults ways to make paper from milk cartons. 2011, we left Sydney, Australia to travel the world, to explore different cultures and to cultivate new ideas and new perspectives. We are interested in collaborative learning with communities and cultures and the natural environment that surrounds us.’
VOLCANO by Jane Polkinghorne
‘The process for these works are hand built objects from found clay. Some I dug at the Hawkesbury and some my neighbors gave me from Earlwood. The smaller volcanoes were burnished with a pebble when they were leather dry to give them their shine. All the volcanoes were fired in a wood kiln.
SALT SHAKERS by Ken and Julia Yonetani
Salinity has posed a major problem for civilizations throughout history, from ancient Mesopotamia over four thousand years ago to present-day Australia. Along the Murray-Darling basin, known as Australia's 'food bowl' because it produces up to ninety per cent of Australia's fresh food, 550,000 tonnes of salt is pumped out of the ground every year to try and stem the increasing rise of highly saline ground-water.
Salt Shakers are made from this groundwater salt. It comes from a project Still Life: The Food Bowl, which draws on the still life genre as an artistic tradition that emerged as current agricultural practices were being developed, bringing new food produce to the tables of a rising European bourgeois class. The themes of consumption, luxury, vanity and mortality portrayed in these early paintings are re-enacted in this installation, now made entirely from salt. The salt works bring focus to the environmental cost of agricultural production and connect with the historical associations of salt - as a powerful, sacred substance that maintains life by enabling food preservation, but also induces the death of ecosystems and the collapse of empires. Salt becomes a metaphor for the rise and fall of civilizations throughout history, and the issues of environmental decline, climate change, and food security that face us on a global scale today.
Ken + Julia are collaborative artists who work in the field of sculptural installation, video, and performance art. They have exhibited together at NKV, Germany, GV Art, London, and throughout Australia including 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Artereal Gallery, Art Gallery of New South Wales, RMIT Gallery, Palimpsest and La Trobe University Museum of Art. In 2011-12 they conducted residencies in Finland and Portugal, funded by the Kone Foundation and Australia Council for the Arts. In 2010, they staged a bed-in performance in Federation Square, Melbourne, and conducted a Synapse Residency in Mildura.
CHINKA by Lana Alsamir Diamond
Lana is a Sydney based designer, whose work is constantly redefining how we use forms and materials and challenging perceived ideas, The result is a raw aesthetic that is thought provoking, and products that possess an emotional value and a strong personal element.
‘This piece was inspired by cut crystal and the way we perceive it as being precious, perfect, valuable and fragile, Chinka is none of these things - it is imperfect and unfinished and adds value to a material (latex) that is usually used to create disposable products. It looks at different meanings for 'collectable' and 'value', It's a piece that has a story to tell and plays with our feelings and perceptions’.
CRYSTALS by Leah Jackson
Leah Jackson is an artist and designer working mostly with hand built and slip cast ceramics. She completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at the ANU School of Art in 2003. Recent exhibitions include: Rock Solid at Pieces of Eight 2011; Texticles at the Melbourne Art Fair 2010; Insert Coin Here 2010; Bottled at PAN Gallery 2009; and Adytum a solo exhibition held at TCB art inc. in Melbourne in 2009. As part of the 2009/10 exhibition committee for Ceramics Victoria Jackson also curated Oasis, Ceramic Victoria's contribution to the Herring Island Festival 2010. Her functional production line has been used in ongoing collaborative Arrangements by Liv Barrett and Joshua Petherick, and is stocked at Craft Victoria's retail space Counter.
PAPERWEIGHT by Matt Fearns
Matt Fearns is a building designer who has also exhibited sculpture in various Sydney galleries. Part of the work of his design practice involves providing documentation to realise public artworks for practicing artists.
‘Paperweight’ is a reprinted process model in connection with a public art commission for the La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science (LIMS) at Latrobe University, produced in collaboration with the artist Reko Rennie.
It was created as a solid object using CAD, which was disaggregated to comprise triangles, which were unfolded, flattened, printed on paper, re-folded, glued back together and painted.
The title of the piece is taken from the 1992 book of the same name by Stephen Fry, which suggests that it has a dual, useful purpose if the reader cannot manage to enjoy the content.
PLASTIC ARTS by Sarah Goffman
‘This series of works came about as a result of my lifelong obsession with blue and white china. The conflation of status and cross-cultural patterning represents a past littered with the desire to covet and collect beautiful, aesthetically pleasing utensils. My work using trash and discarded consumer items has continued, with a focus on the dialogues created by the Silk Road, where eventually the blue willow pattern was devised. It was this design that I was first exposed to, and nurtured by. I think that in converting PET plastics into covetable objects I am counteracting a minuscule portion of the excesses of the society in which we live’.
Sarah Goffman was born in Sydney, Australia in 1966. She has been exhibiting regularly since 1992, and has shown extensively around Australia and overseas. In the past she was co-director of Elastic Projects, founded in 2000, as well as Firstdraft gallery. Her work centers around site-specific projects and installation with mixed media. She also writes and performs as Lucy from the cartoon “Peanuts”. Most recently having completed a residency in Tokyo, she was included in an off-site Yokohama Triennale project in Shin-Minatomira.
DRIPPY CUPS by Sassy Park
‘I want to push the idea of what can be achieved with traditional and unusual materials in art making. Ceramics is especially challenging with its long-standing traditions and common perceptions of what it should be used for and look like. Whilst playing with this elemental material, I still strive to make each object intriguing and appealing in itself.
'Drippy' could be the bleached remains of an unwashed meal left on the sink; gold drips of excess; white drips giving the illusion that the cup itself is overflowing. Or they could give the sense that these objects are dripping in the summer heat, melting back into the ground from whence they came. More intrinsically, it refers to the process ceramics go through, being poured in liquid form into a mould and being subjected to high temperatures in firing. The illusion is that the pots are dripping with liquids or melting. In reality clay withstands this process. The transformative nature of clay is continuously fascinating to me’.
RECEPTACULUM by Sionemaletau Falemaka
Artist, Sionemaletau Falemaka is a triple citizen of Polynesian descendant, Born Niue in the year of the Tiger, educated in Niue, New Zealand and Australia, currently lives, studies, and works in Sydney, creating beaded work that incorporates feathers, seeds, beads, yarns, textiles and other mixed media. Sione was vigorously taught Polynesian weaving techniques as a child. The Falemaka art practice provides a contemporary insight and presentation and of maintaining and extending traditional Polynesian body adornment practice.
PLASTIC FANTASTIC by Supercyclers
Liane Rossler + Sarah K launched ‘Supercyclers’ in April 2011 as a banner for their investigations into reuse of waste materials, and as a platform to profile other designers/designs that they felt were approaching issues of sustainability in worthwhile ways.
CONCRETE DESK MONUMENTS by Tin and Ed
Tin and Ed first met at design school and since then have worked on all types of design projects. Their work encompasses traditional design projects as well as commissioned illustration, sculpture and installation. They enjoy working collaboratively with people with different backgrounds and ideas.
STILL LIFE by Vanessa Holle
‘I am a graphic designer by profession and a maker of things by nature. I learnt the basic crochet stitches 6 years ago by making crocheted granny squares, and slowly discovered it as a method for intricate interwoven pieces of jewellery and objects.
The pieces evolve as I make them through experiment and happenstance, which makes each one unique and hand-made.
The vessels inspired by still-life paintings and crocheted in chunky woven yarn are soft and slightly slumped in contrast to the glass/porcelain objects they imitate’.
