Assignment 1: Response
Masterclass #1_SITE_Monday 1 March 2021, 1-4 pm
Reading: Sculpture in the Expanded Field
Rosalind Krauss
October, Vol. 8. (Spring, 1979), pp. 30-44.
Kate Newby
YES TOMORROW, Adam Art Gallery
Proceed to develop a ‘close reading’ of the work that you have identified. Go experience the work directly. Investigate the work’s making, installation and presentation, who created it, what has been written about it, how was it made, what issues does it speak to—develop a meaningful contextual understanding. Each week’s provocation will then ask you to consider that work through a particular lens and then to develop your own creative response.
Very lucky to be given a guided tour and perspective from both artist Kate Newby and Adam Art Gallery Tina Barton. Yes Tomorrow is a sensory feast, a sculptural collection of childhood beach memories. As we toured the works Kate gave insights into her thinking, concepts and making of the works. The exhibition utilizes the gallery in ways that possibly haven’t been seen before. Up-cycling from years of collected “cherished... collections of found misfits over the last 9 years”. This exhibition, her largest show in Aotearoa, utilizes the whole gallery space as her sculptural canvas. The exhibition draws on several months of research and planning.
Working from Quarantine in Auckland, she began working immediately, contacting suppliers, manufacturers and crafts people. With collected clay fired pieces and newly made thigh tiles, made by forming rectangular sheets of clay over a person's leg, made by friends and family, bundled wind chimes bought over from the USA where she has been living for the past decade. These pieces, titled windchimes, are seen upon entering the gallery space. Dangling and connecting one side of the gallery to the other, being pulled together to suspend and hold the work in this space.
Wind chimes
Decades worth of practice surveying her craft, the clay moves and dances within a draft. Replacing four gallery window panes, with four cast textured membrane like panes with holed glass, reminiscent of rock pools and ocean patterns, the panes create an opening up of the gallery space, a letting in of the elements, sunlight and draft to open the gallery space, a breathing and inviting of the outside world within.
The piece evokes a timeline of kept cherished pieces, a memory chain of events, ordered by color and groupings of size. The draft creates a sonic resonance of these earthen chimes. I imagined higher pitched tinkling’s of sound with the tiny pieces and deeper sonorous tones for the longer pieces. The very act of this work is like the natural processes or phenomenon found along a shoreline of breathing and sighing, the motion of waves, the ebb and flow.
The next adjacent work, with corresponding glass pane installation, sits above a channel cut from the floor tiles.
Within the channel are clay and glass shells, reminiscent of a child’s collection from days foraging along the shoreline. Made by hand from fired clay and fused glass, having been arranged into similar chosen colors like a child’s schematic play. Kates works antagonize buildings and spaces, commenting that it’s too passive to leave the shells on the floor, needing to be showing a threshold between inside and outside, between the gallery space and the work. Entrenching itself into the space.
ocean floor installation
The next piece, which can be viewed from the mezzanine down to the lowest gallery floor, a cobalt blue watercolor stained like ocean, or seabed blue sand ground sculpture. A unique experience as a viewer to be able to walk on top of this textural floating world.
Constructed by hand from fast drying concrete and stained later with paint, highly visually textural, deliberate subtle marks have been made, pitted and scratched, like traces of a child's hand playing on the beach, the work reminds me of sand or a seabed.
Silica orbs
The whole show is a sensory and sensual feast, tying into one's own experiences and memories of a coastline. It’s a rare sensory experience, walking on the surface of an artwork, a feeling of temporality, a changing surface made by footsteps, varied and unfolding under your feet. The ocean floors sculpture is restrained in its texture and ornamentation simplifying your focus as the recipient, multisensory tuning, tactile and textural. Finger marks, the artist's hand, are recurring motifs.
A sense of touch and gradual movement as you move through the space. If the land art movement makes art from its environment, this show brings the memory sensations of the beach into the gallery. It speaks to our environment, possibly Kate's desire to be within her own memories of her childhood beach while cooped up in NY. “The logic of sculpture, it would seem, is inseparable from the logic of the monument. By virtue of this logic a sculpture is a commemorative representation.”
In a corner, catching the light of the day, are a collection of glass orbs. Made from a material found along beaches of the world, silica, these responsive light collectors trigger memories of light bouncing on the water's surface, or rock pools filled by sunbeams.
Made by cupping and forming wax by hand, then casting with glass, they speak of transformation, of processes found in nature, linking into the previous collection of glass filled shells.
On the mezzanine, we glance through a textured glass with rock pool formed aperture like holes, peeking through we glimpse an extension of the works, terracotta tiles from locally dug clay. Highly responsive to the internal space the tiles respond to the architectural orientation, allowing a view from the textural glass window below.
Glass pane aperture
Reminiscent of washed ashore found objects and ceramics.
The final piece, grouped collections of works that span her career, the pieces placed on a pier like barrier. Feels like a museum display and survey in the way it’s presented. Resisting the temptation to touch and experience the pieces. These works also remind the viewer of the world under our feet, as a viewer, we look down to experience them, just as Kate has. Intention is to create a window install which plays and changes with the light of the day, rather than a projection of light within an installation space. Like Kate, to “bring the outside within”
I think these works are a glimpse into a happier time along the shoreline of her childhood, juxtaposed against Newby living in New York City, an over populated condensed megalopolis. Beneath it’s veneer, the question kept arising for me, in this environmentally ravaged world where many are forced to live in high rise cities, devoid of nature, perhaps a political statement of sorts, who has access to nature?
Kates work for me is speaking to the monument that is nature, “It sits in a particular place and speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place”... Where sculpture sits within the monument lexicon, flipping the switch so that nature itself is the monument that is being represented. “a marker at a particular place for a specific meaning/event.”
“Because they thus function in relation to the logic of representation and marking, sculptures are normally figurative and vertical, their pedestals an important part of the structure since they mediate between actual site and representational sign.”
Response: Over the past six months I have been developing a series glass pane Ocean Cathedrals, in continuation of my Exposure exhibition work,
Crit response, ocean sculpture
“A compressed moment of time, underplayed by light refractions, in silent contemplative stillness.”
The philosophy and aesthetics from the Light and Space movement has guided this works development and where this movement utilized a parallel technology for fabrication from the military, mine has derived from computer film technology.
Drawing from the Space and Light movement, artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Ann Veronica Janssens and Anish Kapoor, who generate the experience of light through objects and like them create an atmosphere through immersive installation art. Riffing off of Kate's concept of bringing the ocean landscape within the confines of a gallery space,
Ocean Cathedral proposal
This current body of work seeks to present a mediated experience of nature that interrogates our sensory perceptions of time and light and our relationship to the natural world that generate experiences of light through objects, I utilize technology to fabricate immersive atmospheres through objects, light and sound installations.