Interlocutor
2015
patinated laser cut 6mm steel plate
Exhibitions
Sydney Contemporary
Sydney Contemporary Art Fair
10-13 September 2015
Mossgreen Gallery Melbourne
26th November – 20th December 2015
~MATTER - MATER - MOTHER - FATHER - PATER - PATTERN~
These sculptures emerged out of a studio process of making numerous maquettes and variations on the theme and from them generating CAD patterns which were cut from steel plate and fabricated by myself and a team at the Fasham factory in Melbourne.
Each sculpture in this exhibition is an interlocutor in the dialogue between what it might mean to be a separate entity or an element of a wider system. Each is also is an interlocutor in the dialogue between what it might mean to be masculine and what it might mean to be feminine. Each sculpture asks how does an entity distinguish itself, how does it stand out from its context.
Matrilocutor and Patrilocutor encode an interplay between matter and pattern as a foundational order of linguistic and manifest reality. Each seeks solace and completion in the other. They are Rex and Regina, alchemical lovers, ramifications and concretions of the dialectic between the feminine and the masculine encoded in the Hindu and Greco-Roman pantheons and other systems of belief and thought. In the alembic of relational being they are the reciprocal other to one-another.
The tetrapod of Patrilocutor suggests a right angled, orthogonal, Cartesian certitude while the tripod of Matrilocutor is more inherently stable and efficient, suggesting flexibility and accommodation of difference.* Her swooping curves suggest the generative potency of feminine fertility. Interlocutor is hermaphroditic while Barolocutor embodies the interplay of matter and pattern in a process of stylistic change.
These objects arise partly out of a sense of a domestic uncanny; an eros of toilet brushes and sink plungers - the physical presence of the hallway stand or the night table are all part of the inhabited and haunted spatiality of the home. Accoutrements speak of the body, it's physical and psychic extension into the world and the other. The simultaneous receding and advancement that we negotiate every moment - the tactility of thought, the inception of the self occurring in the reception by the bizarre things that we grasp, stand on, rub against, sit on, pass through, stick in our mouths, in short we are constituted in our relations to the world, a dissipated chimeric clutter we eroticise and which eroticises us and is the extended configuration and constitution of self and world.
Horns of the Dilemma rises from the floor in two Fibonacci curves. Each iteration of its form becomes closer to the vertical and closer to the golden mean without ever attaining either, as to do so would require an infinite number of iterations. Its parts meld into each other. The peaks could be seen as concrescent becomings, or heightened occasions of experience. Horns of the Dilemma contains its context within itself; it exists not as a thing, not as an entity separable from its context. It could be interpreted in the light of the saying attributed to Polish alchemist Sendivogius – Maior autem animae pars extra corpus est (the major part of the soul is outside the body).
Interlocutor is dedicated to Monia Brizzi, my muse and beloved other.
Matrilocutor 2015
Edition of three
226cm high, 830cm wide, 830cm deep
Metallic polyurethane on 6mm mild steel plate
Patrilocutor 2015
Edition of three
240cm high, 104.5cm wide, 104.5 cm deep
Metallic polyurethane on 6mm mild steel plate
Barolocutor 2015
Edition of three
192cm high, 60 mm wide, 60 cm deep
Metallic polyurethane on 6mm mild steel plate
Interlocutor 2015
Edition of three
240cm high, 75 cm wide, 75 cm deep
Metallic polyurethane on 6mm mild steel plate
Horns of the Dilemma 2015
Edition of three
326cm high, 90 cm wide, 100 cm deep
Cor-ten steel
Paratekton Tower 2010-15
320 cm high, 180 cm wide, 180 cm deep
Plywood and acrylic paint