‘Occulture: The Dark Arts’ at City Gallery Wellington

Last weekend I flew down to Wellington for the day so that I could attend the opening of ‘Occulture’ at the City Gallery. I have never been at such a busy opening day with so many packed-out floor talks! It was seriously heartening for me to see so much interest in work with this kind…

Sydney Biennale Part 1

On the 15th March Justine and I spent 3 days at the Vernissage of the 2016 Sydney Biennale. We spent hours and hours each day walking and looking at artworks which was both exhausting and exhilarating. I’ve divided our viewing into 2 posts which just feature a few of the works I enjoyed the most. I’m not…

Wolfgang Laib

A friend of mine saw the work I’ve been doing with beeswax, honey and, most recently, bee pollen and suggested I take a look at Wolfgang Laib. “Informed by the purity and simplicity of Eastern philosophies, he employs natural materials, most notably milk, pollen, beeswax, rice and marble. His works are more complex than being…

Matthew Barney: The Gesamtkunstwerk and Cosmology Creation

Gesamtkunstwerk: a total, ideal, comprehensive, universal work of art. A self-enclosed aesthetic system. This term is German in origin and has been assimilated into the English language particularly in the realm of aesthetics. It can be seen in the work of artists such as Matthew Barney, who creates huge cosmologies from the linking, the relating and…

Mikala Dwyer and The Language of Things

“Walter Benjamin understood the true collector’s collection as a ‘magic encyclopedia’. Such a collection is animated. It acquires a life of it’s own. What is more, when objects are added to it they undergo a rebirth as they are placed in this new context.” Taussig, M. Art and Magic and Real magic. P26, Franzidis, E….

Work from September 2014

I realised that I hadn’t posted progress photos of my work from September last year and January this year. Looking back on this work is curious… it’s interesting and it seems like a step towards what I’m trying to create, but just and experiment with materials and ideas. I went from the very clinical, minimalist…

Sculpture for a possible future

Ashley Zelinskie works in a future where we have reached the singularity and machines live on par with humans. Her work examines the way machines and humans view the word differently and how works can be made that can be appreciated by both. Her laser cut and 3d printed objects are covered with hexadecimal code…

Unmonumental – Object in the 21st Century

“Recuperating the tradition of assemblage and the prehensile alertness of collage, todays sculpture seems to be less engaged in interrogating its own status than it is over excited by the idea of annexing the whole world to it’s own body.” p65 This blog entry is in response to the essay; Gioni, M. (2007) Ask The Dust….

Copper object tests

I’ve been working with copper over the last couple of months and there is one object in particular – a dodecahedron – that had required a long process. As I’ve been going along with the creation of the object I’ve discovered that I really enjoy some of the forms it takes along the way. In…

The Expanded Field

Rosalind E. Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1978) (Krauss, R. “The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths” (1985) The MIT Press; London, England) is a really useful essay that I have read three times and will probably read again. It examines the emergence of Postmodern sculptural practices and how they can be…