Sculpture in the Vineyards is an annual outdoor sculpture exhibition featuring sculpture and site specific installations from artists selected by a panel of curators. In 2011 this included Cassandra Hard- Lawrie, Todd Fuller and Tara Morelos. I worked directly with Cassandra and Todd who had a great eye for narrative and overall comosition. I still haven't met Tara, but could tell she also had the collective touch with composing and curating the exhibition within the other vineyards. I have sampled a few works (see below) to show my favourite pieces in the exhibition) . There were elements of floating, freezing time, dismantling and memory welling up through the pieces. I was excited by a sense of play and polarity that surfaced in some of the artworks below, of rhythm and stillness.
First hand notes:
It was a fabulous experience being involved...installing in the rain with umbrellas and slippery ladders, eating home packed lunch boxes of tapioca, strawberries and coconut milk, My faithful Dingo Minnie bounding freely through the expanse of vines and grass flats leading down to my site: a lonely old weeping willow settled centre in the field, almost touching a slightly smaller tree next to it, but not quite.
At first I was allured by the promise of a narrative of impossible love and loneliness, of the nature of connections and disconnections and communication. Why does the willow weep? At first bare and skeletal when I saw it in winter, transforming into a solid enclosed secret space when the summer comes and it is able to flourish. This action encapsulates the nature of sadness, and led me to play some more. I played with this theme with skeleton staircases,wine glass shells, empty typewriter cartridges and reconstructed boxing gloves 9 years ago also. Something familiar was resurfacing.
I set about making some tears for the weeping willow out of earthenware clay, 400 handmade little bells (an upside down vessel that makes noise). Process based motivation, as I am in to touch and repetition at the moment in my practice. My original intention was to draw intimate designs on the inside of each bell before it was fired, but instead, by accident and whilst listening to love song dedications, I started to write the lyrics of the song. While they hang installed side by side, lyrically disconnected, (out of order) the meaning of the lyrics is lost and replaced by the music created by the bells own music.
This particular process of returning to the most immediate source of the senses and removing the layers of meaning we attach to things and our interaction with the world, is a fascination of mine that I have set out to explore in 2011. An era of the brain and not the hand, of invented lives, cyber avatars and tasting through words, I feel even more enchanted by the motivations of touch, site, sound and smell that guide me to art making. And for once I left the process guide me there, and not the mind as all I wanted to do to start with was make pots, keep my hands busy because I missed my boyfriend.
A catalogue excerpt from my installation titled 'Canopy': (http://www.sculptureinthevineyards.com.au/?cat=223)
http://www.sculptureinthevineyards.com.au/
CANOPY
Ceramics, string, dimensions variable –
'Canopy’ is a site specific piece that works with drawing the sensory elements together, quietly while co-existing with the natural form. I have recently been collaborating with the musician Fi Claus, and was inspired work with the none-literal and more intangible qualities of music I can learn from and express within my own art practice. Canopy draws together the senses and acts as an ‘ensemble assemblage’. I am working this way to escape some of the syntax of form and escape the four walls and context of the gallery space, like music often escapes language.
I emphasise the installation’s quiet nature, and contradiction. A canopy is something that protects and draws your eyes up away from form and more towards the formless.
Amanda Humphries is an artist from Northern NSW who currently resides in Sydney. She rotates working between May Street Studios with a group of thirty artists, to being completely alone in her studio on the family property. She has been involved in a number of shows and has had solo shows in ARI’s, regional and commercial galleries both in Australia and overseas, including a residency in India in 2008, and a scholarship to study and exhibit in the USA in 2002. Amanda studied her BFA at CoFA at UNSW and the University of California, San Diego and attends and teaches art workshops regularly.
FIONA EDMEADES:
I am interested in everyday objects, full of allure and the manner in which they exist alongside us as they populate our lives. The chair is a multifaceted object, full of allure and mystery. With rich history and strong symbolic content.
An object that is part of our innermost world; into which we surrender our bodies, retreat, or seek comfort. The relationship of our everyday being-in-the-world with this object, animates the chair, and in this way, it embodies a threshold between the temporal and the eternal worlds’ of being. Collapsing the boundaries further, these chairs have been deconstructed and reconfigured, transcending their previous existence, removed from the dwelling and suspended in the landscape.
Graduating from the National Art School in 2009, Fiona Edmeades was recently awarded the ArtsStart grant from the Australia Council of the Arts. In her recent solo show entitled ‘Seats of the Soul’ (unravelling the everyday chair), Fiona revisits her roots as a traditional upholster in London in the early 90’s. Fiona Edmeades is interested in the everyday objects and the manner in which their existence is so intimately entwined within our own. Fiona’s current body of work, investigates the chair as an object of both temporal and symbolic significance.
JaM: Levitating Lightly
Perspex, wood, metal, water, 1500 x 700 x 1100mm –
This work alludes to the dispersal of the bodies molecules, and the soul’s energy, through the biosphere after death. A CAD sectional drawing was made of a prone human body and recreated in perspex rods. The opaque sections of the rods represent the body, which appears to be floating over the transparent sections, and over the body of water from which ir rises, like a body levitating lightly.
Jane Theau and Mandy Pryse-Jones have pursued separate art practices for several years and our artistic collaboration JaM, came to fruition 2 years ago when we were both awarded a residency at the Primrose Park Studio. From this residency we developed ideas for exhibitions at Primrose Park and the Bondi Pavillion in 2010. The JaM collaborative practice is largely focused on human interactions with the landscape. Our first public sculpture was a piece titled ‘From life to life’ in the 2011 Hidden exhibition at Rookwood.
AKIRIA KAMADA: Chaos and Harmony
Recycled timber, metal, paint,
7000 x 3000 x 3000mm – $13,000
Born in Japan 1955, Akira migrated to Australia 1987. Has been exhibiting in sculpture shows and competitions such as Sculpture by the Sea, UWS Sculpt ure Award, Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, Sculpture in the Vineyards, etc over the past 6 years.
PETRA SVOBODA: Gokko – Uma (Make Believe Horse)
Ceramic, 500 x 450 x 300mm $1,900ea
Petra’s practice explores the rising popularity of Anime, Manga (comics), designer toys, and computer games, and how they propel a powerful merchandising machine which generates superfluous amounts of objects often marketed as “collectable”. The inflatable form is presented as a metaphor for the superficial lightness of commercial merchandising. The transformed inflatable object also situates itself firmly in the realm of illusion and chimera, connecting itself with the fantasy genre of computer games, animation, and film. There is not only an allusion to play throughout the installation, but also a play on the senses through the apparent metamorphosis of the original plastic objects.
In 2009, Petra received and Australian Postgraduate Award and Zelda Stedman Travel Scholarship to embark on an international exchange to Scandinavia. While studying at The National Academy of Arts Oslo, Petra developed her current body of work. Following her 5 month exchange in Norway, Petra went on to do a residency at The international Ceramic Research Centre in Denmark. Here she worked on concepts that related to contemporary notions of play. In 2010 Petra’s Gokko-Rando series (make believe land) was selected to be shown in ‘Sculpture Now!?!’ a survey of contemporary Australian sculpture alongside other artists such as Stelarc and Rod McRae at the Yarra Sculpture Gallery in Victoria. Petra’s work was also selected for the 2010 Sculpture in the Vineyards exhibition and she was a finalist in the Walker St Gallery Emerging Artist Awards.
WILL COLES: Memorial to the unknown armchair
general
Cold cast resin – POA
Born 1972 & raised in the English countryside. My grandfather, Norman Sillman, was a respected sculptor & therefore I always felt it in my blood. I went to Wimbledon & Glasgow Schools of Art but my grandpa taught me more than they could. I moved to Sydney in 1996 & I’ve been getting my work into peoples faces ever since. I want people to see that art has an important role to play in their lives. Art, especially mine, can be thoughtful, provocative, enriching & humorous.
PETER TILLEY: Tomorrow is another day
Cast iron and Corten steel, 1800 x 1130 x 450mm – $14,000
This work is a large cast iron and steel sculpture and continues the theme of my recent works in utilising my own experience. In this particular case childhood memories are used as raw material and the basis for the narrative. There can be a sense of emptiness, suggestive of the transient nature of life, and there is also a tendency for inanimate objects to predominate. However, a range of thematic ideas and formal strategies are employed, derived from a visual vocabulary that is readily understood. The objects and imagery employed are universally common yet multi layered in meaning, significance and complexity. They address humanist concerns through realism and figuration. My work is concerned with truth and order, which is evident in the elegant simplicity. I try to achieve a simplicity in these still life tableaux that is incisive and intuitively accepted yet capable of complex layers of meaning. There are many possible interpretations depending on the viewers own journey through life.
Studied Art and Ceramics at Newcastle School of Art and Design and was privately trained as a sculptor. Master of Philosophy (Fine Art) Newcastle University. Has participated in over 70 group shows and 25 solo exhibitions. SxS Bondi and SxS Cottesloe numerous times since 2004, SXS Aarhus 2009, 2011. Sculpture in the vineyards 2010, Rookwood cemetery 2011. Represented in public and private collections in Australia, and private collections overseas.
