Shadow Script
2012

Bamboo yarn dyed in Sennelier Indian Ink, steel pins, screws
Approx. 4 x 3 x 3 m
Installation view: Spectrum Project Space, Edith Cowan University, Perth

Metallic
Curated by Jasmin Stephens

Considering a group of artists from across Australia who set up a productive tension with their materials

Metallic presents a group of artists from across Australia who share a preoccupation with the nature and purpose of materials and a concern for questions of transference and attachment. Six artists from Perth whose practices span drawing, spatial installation and sound are situated alongside three counterparts from Sydney. Works have been included because they appear simultaneously persuasive and ‘ordinary’, they work with and against their materials and they effect some kind of energy shift.

Here, the processes of transferring and attaching connect us in incidental and significant ways. One can transfer a file, apply an adhesive or declare an allegiance. They are processes with aesthetic and social connotations that can be even and uninterrupted or spontaneous and contested. Gaps and breaks in transmission are not only assumed but are cultivated by these artists.

Metallic seeks to foster greater awareness of ideas and approaches that inform Western Australian practices. It explores this penchant for materials in terms that extend beyond a vernacular ‘DIY’ aesthetic or the recent trend of accentuating magical properties of objects. While the exhibition recognises the presence of diffused as opposed to explicit narratives in these artists’ work, it also attends to their critical alignments – a process linked to the current re-assertion of the confluence between nature and technology.

© Mimi Tong 2023