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gallery 1

Lucy Irvine

Containment

Crafted objects are important assertions of identity within many cultures.  Lucy Irvine explores the ceremonial and symbolic aspects of basketry, and subverts its practical function.    

Cultural history, craft and environmental observations provide the context for Irvine’s contemporary art practice.   By making the pieces from plastic piping and cable ties, a dialogue is created between the industrially produced components and the handmade / handcrafted.  These sculptural vessels evoke both natural forms and ceremonial objects. 

Irvine is also interested in the negative spaces created by these hybrid vessels.  Each object beckons the viewer to peer into its throat or belly.  The interiors can be smooth or textured.  Subtle patterns can be discerned.  The cable ties that bind the piping sometimes point inward, filling the cavity with spikes, akin to a carnivorous plant.   This playful use of negative space makes these works just as interesting on the inside as on the outside. 

Originally from Scotland, Irvine has a longstanding interest in craft.  She has been influenced by a resurgence of traditional Scottish crafts and, after completing a travel scholarship to California in 2001, has developed an interest in Native American basketry. 

gallery 2

Kim Vernon

Highrise

The architects will build it, but the inhabitants will personalise it.  Kim Vernon explores the relationship between buildings and their occupants. 

In a place where most people know only highrise life, Hong Kong appears an organic city, forever growing and changing.  Bamboo scaffolding provides the framework for bridges linking skyscrapers, rotting in the humidity, growing and decomposing at the same time.  The spaces within these buildings constantly alter…occupants add, modify and tear down in an attempt to personalise their space and extend ownership.  

Like neural networks, some links are renewed and strengthened whilst others fall into disuse and decay.  Some are built over or around.  Set pathways give way to shortcuts and trespasses on stolen space. 

Melbourne is in the early stages of this journey.  The newer buildings are shiny and clean, the older ones already connecting to each other with walkways and other linkages.  Interiors are mutated, signs are added, posters and billboards cover once proud new walls. 

Responding to the unseen bonds between occupant and highrise, Vernon captures the homogenized city, and its mutations, on canvas.  

Vernon has lived in Hong Kong for several years and has regularly exhibited his work there.    He now lives and paints in Melbourne.

gallery 3

Jane Poynter and Christine Wood

SHUSH!

It’s pitch black and it’s cold. From the dunes it would be hard to work out what these two photographers are doing up to their knees, in the sea, in the middle of the night.   In between shouts and hoots of laughter a flash fires and then they run back up the beach and start the process again…

Christine and Jane are creating camera-less prints underwater. Each 8 x 10 piece of photographic paper is exposed by a large flash unit while being held just under the surface of the water. Each ‘negative’ is unique, capturing all the elements of the seashore – the motion of the waves, sand, seaweed and foam.

The works in this exhibition represent both the collaboration of the initial creative process and the different art practices of the two artists. Both artists have selected small details from the paper negatives, but have presented their pieces using very different methods.

Christine Wood’s work is a series of large photographic prints mounted on perspex. Her prints have been arranged in a grid to reflect the inherent order in nature. Colours found in nature have been used to emphasise the shapes within the originally black and white images.

Jane Poynter works with shards of glass that have monochromatic images adhered to the surface to represent the overlapping layers in nature. The transparency of the glass and the overlapping layers give a sense of the motion of water on the shore. The translucent quality of the images mirrors the transience and changeability of water and of nature itself.

Shush!    A dialogue between two photographers at red gallery.

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