The Material House
Words by C. Tracey
New Materiality asks ‘To what purpose is this material?’ Using the opportunity to install artworks and perform in the House Conspiracy spaces, the six artists in this unique exhibition explore this question by delving into the ‘stuff’ that structures our experiences in the everyday world. This residency cycle touches on deep considerations found in the how and why of our daily lives. Referencing the material turn, the exhibition places materiality as the central influence of aesthetics and metaphor. Objects are considered in their rawness as ‘matter’, with each artist engaging in a practice-based process of inspection, deconstruction, analysis, and reconstruction. These explorations unearth the context of the chosen materials, using art-making to denaturalise the found object and explore the lived spheres we share. As power relations shift, the discourse of inquiry unpicks what we thought was known. Material understandings are remade and shift the sociocultural negotiations that are present in the everyday object. With each material choice, an anthropocentric purview is varied, finding the dualism of materiality and culture housed in the familiar.
Fabric, concrete, plastic, and video are used to rework the site and consider the surrounding neighborhood. Materials sourced from the house and urban landscape around House Conspiracy include local beeswax, discarded construction waste, and curbside trash. Plastic is used with renewed purpose, paying homage to ideas of sustainability and the environment. Through investigative cycles that dissect material purpose and repurpose, each reworking adjusts the perceived notions of matter. No longer inert or uniform substances that are devoid of socially constructed meaning, New Materiality calls to account the agentic forces of matter as an active medium. Our ‘things’ invisibly sculpted by social worlds, informed by historical conditioning, human life, and experience.
As you walk through New Materiality novel approaches to site and space intersect the domestic architecture. Connotations are equalised as concrete settles into new forms and plastic floats ephemeral, loved, illuminated, and hand-stitched. Time taken bestows value, purpose, and context on the discarded and forgotten. Dialogues of impermanence and permanence carve out the space with fleeting performances weaving between the sculptural installations. To experience this work, long-held notions about the worth of things must be discarded, replaced instead with suggested intuitions provided by the artists' perspective. This brings into being a question of how spaces are inhabited, from the domestic to the suburban, and what impact this has on the self and society.
Rubbish compiled from the neighborhood is reworked and art-cycled without wagging a finger at excess, instead beauty is discovered in the material explorations as a sincere approach to understanding the stuff of the everyday. The impermanence of plastic is made heavy, cemented with new importance as impressions and casts of things forgotten and overlooked are filled, remoulded into fresh ways of seeing.
A wall is intersected by cornicing, casts of this architectural feature are displayed, punctuating the experience of the room to redefine opaque boundaries of the domestic space. The ‘House’ is now remade as an inner-city exploration of art and community. This work is both profoundly sensitive and loaded with meaning, existing in the middle space in which art happens, somewhere between intuition and knowing, between space and site, material and experience. Moving through the rooms, intimacy is found in seductive peepholes woven into the interior landscape. Filled with locally sourced beeswax they shift the focus of the eye to adumbrated spaces, positioned high above a doorway, hard to reach but powerfully inviting, causing the viewer to change the expected navigation of the space in order to view the work. A new room and bodily ciphers emerge from fabric contorted like flesh. Our own health is brought to mind as suspended material finds a surgical framing. The affect of objects is unwoven, explored with a sense of knowing and shared experience, how many of us recognise these things and see them anew through the artist’s eyes? Can we find ourselves in these sections of remade domestic architecture? Captured like some rare archaeological find, the banality of the domestic space is translated into a poignant reworking. We become intimate with these rooms, finding meaning in the emptiness of the space. The present is filled with suggestions of past histories that are whispered through the familiar relationships found in each installation.
Outside the influence of everyday technology is explored, complex systems of observation and documentation illuminate the exterior of the building. Distorted images travel from Germany to illuminate an old queenslander’s exterior, projections that hint at the shared experiences of our daily lives. The purpose of material , whether new, lost or forgotten, is in the bodies that it holds and the community that it binds. This exhibition locates these invisible threads and weaves them into a compelling reworking of the familiar. As global art and new materiality meets the local community, it could only happen here, with these people, in this ‘House’.