sculpture – kerynrobinson

RMIT grad show 2019

glowing pink sphere

My friend David graduated from RMIT Visual Arts (Sculpture) recently. The RMIT graduate show was amazing, a rabbit warren of rooms in three buildings on Swanston Street. My main criticism was that instead of having labels on the work, or even numbers, there are maps of the various rooms and spaces. This makes it really hard to work out whose work you are looking at. (There’s nothing to stop students making their own labels though!)

Highlights for me were some of sculptural pieces (in particular the orange spectacular by Fiz) and some hanging rice paper works by Yanqi Zhao. I also loved a glowing red/pink sphere but unfortunately could not find the artist’s name.

Yanqi Zhao

Sculpture room

The exhibition was well worth another look but unfortunately it closes on November 27. Well done, RMIT graduates!

Judy Chicago

I recently came across an 80 year old female artist I’d never heard of. She was a pioneer of the feminist art movement in the 1960s and 70s in the US.

Her early working life was lonely and she was mostly broke. “I didn’t make myself an outsider,” she says. “The art world made me an outsider. Of course, isolation is essential to the creative act. You have to be with yourself, with your ideas. Virginia Woolf talked about it as fishing: you sit on the shore, you drop your line, and you wait for the fish to jump. But I also had to protect myself from the craziness, all the antagonism, around me. It was difficult. I’m not going to say it was anything else. Not everybody could have managed it.”

What did she sacrifice along the way? “Children. There was no way on this earth I could have had children and the career I’ve had. But you know what? I don’t care how much I had to give up. This was what I wanted. You have to make choices. You can’t have everything in life.”

The Dinner Party Judy Chicago — The Dinner Party – Judy Chicago 1974–1979

As for her elaborate 1979 megasculpture The Dinner Party, a provocatively feminist work which celebrates the lives and work of 1,038 notable women, you can forget what the critics say (the late Robert Hughes called it: “Mainly cliché… with the colours of a Taiwanese souvenir factory”; Hilton Kramer of the New York Times called it: “Very bad art… failed art… art so mired in the pieties of a cause that it quite fails to capture any independent artistic life of its own”

With three retrospective exhibitions in the UK in 2012 and increasing acclaim for her work in the past decade, she has finally achieved the respect she deserves. Her famous work The Dinner Party comprises triangular table laid with 39 place settings, each one designed to reflect the accomplishments of a woman – included are Hildegard of Bingen, Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf. Beneath the table is a ‘heritage floor’, the names of a further 999 women (Catherine of Aragon, Colette, Clytemnestra) inscribed on its tiles. It sounds uncontroversial, celebrating, as it does, the history of women through applied arts such as embroidery and china painting. But then you look at the plates. Each one is decorated with a symbol that resembles a vulva. Depending on your point of view, this is either reductive, vulgar and semi-pornographic, or it’s celebratory, taboo-breaking and bracingly political.

The piece I love most is a fireworks installation ‘A butterfly for Brooklyn‘ she made in 2015.

Art-world statistics, in particular, still make for depressing reading. Work by women artists comprises just 3–5% of major permanent collections in the US and Europe. “It’s alarming. In our institutions, women are still an add-on to a male-centred curriculum,” she says.

Quotes from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/nov/04/judy-chicago-art-feminism-britain

Niki de Saint Phalle

Born at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1930, the painter and sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle grew up in New York. At 18 she eloped with writer and childhood friend Harry Matthews, and they had two children together. Niki didn’t fit the domesticated wife mould, and after a nervous breakdown she started painting as therapy. In 1960 Niki left her husband and children to devote herself to her art. She lived with sculptor Jean Tinguely, and became a member of the Paris group of artists the ‘Nouveaux Réalistes’.

In their group exhibition Niki presented her ‘shooting’ paintings for the first time. She filled polythene bags with paint and enclosed them within plaster on a board backing.

She, or spectators, then shot at the painting, releasing the paint in random explosions of colour.

From 1964 came her monumental goddess sculptures, the Nanas (‘nana’ is French for ‘chick’). The buxom, colorful female figures, inspired by a friend’s pregnancy, and first made of yarn, paper-maché and wire and later made of polyester, represent happy, freed women and harbingers of a new matriarchal age.

Continue reading “Niki de Saint Phalle”

Angel sculpture, Queen Street

I sometimes work at an office in Bourke Street, and have often noticed this angel sculpture, high on a wall next door to an office building at 160 Queen Street, Melbourne.

I finally decided to photograph it recently. Unfortunately I couldn’t find out any information about the sculptor, and there wasn’t a plaque at the site (that I could find), but it is quite beautiful. The figure looks futurist to me, stylised and holding a wheel. If anyone knows more about it please contact me…

Lavandula lavender farm, near Daylesford

I recently visited Lavandula lavender farm. It’s incredibly beautiful and there was a sculpture show on as a bonus. Sculptures from 25 artists, including Zoe Amor, Paul Turbitt, and Kaya Storm dotted the gardens.

My favourite sculpture in the show was by Peter Laszlo.

The soul is like a sail

This work was inspired by the Revelation of Ares.
In this book the Creator asks Humanity to change towards the Good.
The book explains that man is not born with a soul but has to create
one for himself. This can only be achieved by following the virtuous way
of life. One does to need to believe in any religion or dogma, simply
to love other human beings and respect all living things…
Once the soul has been created by a virtuous loving, giving and forgiving life it will glide along the sea of spiritual eternity.

The needle is used to repair the damage – Louise Bourgeois

I researched Louise Bourgeois for an assignment a while back, but I didn’t particularly like her work. But when I recently saw her work in the flesh at Heide Museum of Modern Art, I was impressed and moved.

Her large sculpture Spider (1997) – a huge metal spider enclosing a cage containing a chair, pieces of tapestry, an old fashioned perfume bottle, darning needles and hatpins, small bones, and a cameo, which seemed like personal objects from her past – lurked in the gloom, resonating with psychological unease. The more I looked at it, the more details I noticed. It’s like a strange museum exhibit of Bourgeois’s traumatic childhood.

Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor. L. Bourgeois

The headless and partially limbless torsos, made of bandages, fabric and wood, one with a knife instead of a head, and the headless, deformed couple apparently having sex, were a disturbing embodiment of dysfunction, desire, fear and sexuality. I also found the black female figure hanging upside down like a carcass quite confronting.

Blue Days (1996) – a collection of Bourgeois’ dresses and shirts, on stuffed headless torsos like dressmakers forms, hanging on hooks on metal rods – felt merely nostalgic and ‘lighter’ than some of the other work. A welcome respite from the psychological darkness.

Cinq is five stuffed fabric heads hanging from the same hook. It was suggested that they might represent Bourgeois’s family. I liked the simplicity and tenderness of this work.

There was also a collection of lithographs of drawings and text. I liked the phrase ‘To unravel a torment you must begin somewhere’. The word unravel continues the sewing metaphor which pervades the work.

When I was growing up all the women in my house were using needles. I’ve always had a fascination with…the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair the damage.
L. Bourgeois, 1992

In a way I suppose Bourgeois was repairing the damage of her early trauma, using her needle, for most of her life.

Kieran Stewart

Kieran Stewart was our Context and Culture lecturer at VU and his enthusiasm for art is infectious.

He’s also a visual artist who works across the mediums of video, image making and sculptural installation. Kieran explores concepts of labour, systems of commercial promotion and gross capital production.

Kieran makes inflatable sculptures and his Occupy Nothing is a wall that deflates when someone approaches. The work re-inflates when is stops sensing movement. Kieran’s work often has a playful and unusual quality that I like.

Powered up and broken was a modified ATM placed in a gallery that printed the title and description of work on a receipt when you attempted to withdraw cash. This is one of Kieran’s favourite works and I love the craziness of it. More about Kieran here.

Yayoi Kusama exhibition

In March I went to Brisbane Gallery Of Modern Art to see Yayoi Kusama’s exhibition, Look now, see forever.

In the show were large acrylic sculptures, installation rooms with inflatables, sculptures and mirrors, and large paintings, including an ‘Infinity Net’ series which inspired my Psychedelic Pink Coral painting. The Obliteration Room, an interactive work — a white room containing white furniture — was gradually covered with round colourful stickers by the audience. I love Yayoi Kusama’s work, it is so vibrant, quirky and colourful, and her installations are amazing. I first saw her work a few years back, her infinity room Soul under the moon, which is also at Brisbane GOMA. It’s incredible. You enter a small dark room and feel like you’re in a galaxy stretching to infinity. I’m so pleased I was able to see more of her work this year.