|
 |
'Natural Woman' and 'Inside Out'
|
|
Gallery: Gallery and Window Boxes
Artists involved:
Kate Just (Melbourne)
Alice Lang (Brisbane)
Curator: Bree Jackson
Kate Just
Artist Statement: Natural Woman is a solo show of works I have prepared over the last year and a half: My Daphne, Shed That Skin, and a suite of collages entitled You Make Me Feel and Natural Woman.
My Daphne, inspired by the Greek myth of the same name, was the first of the works produced and marked a new direction in my work, a conscious turn toward using knitted sculpture to reinterpret mythologies which outline a strong connection between women and nature. In the myth, archer Eros creates a terrible curse with his two arrows, one tipped in gold, one blunted and tipped with lead. The arrow dipped in gold has the power to create insatiable lust in a person, while the other creates absolute abhorrence towards all things romantic and passionate. The arrow dipped in gold strikes Apollo, but the arrow dipped in lead strikes fair Daphne. Apollo gives chase to Daphne, desperate for her love, but she wants nothing to do with him, and runs from him endlessly, eventually begging her river-god father Peneus to transform her into a laurel tree. When Apollo reaches the laurel tree, he is still enamored with Daphne, and holds the tree in a special place in his heart forever.
My Daphne focuses on the last moment of transformation, her fair knitted arm the only human vestige remaining, reaching, patting at the place where her head would be. My Daphne has no man-in-chase, or discomfort in her changing state. She chooses transformation, not as a form of escape, but for the chance to become ‘one’ with nature. The entire scene is encased in a knitted, ‘feminine’ surface which binds and protects.
Shed That Skin was inspired by paintings I saw in Europe by Van der Goes, Michelangelo, Hieronymous Bosch and Tiepolo which image the serpent tempting Eve (Adam is generally sort of hanging around nearby) with fruits from the Tree of Knowledge. Biblical descriptions and these paintings portray the serpent as a beautiful woman on the top and a snake on the bottom. Her face tilts towards Eve in sisterhood or slight sexual provocation; sometimes her hands and expression mirror Eve’s. This early story and centuries of its retelling marks snakes as dark, evil creatures and women as conniving, easily tempted, untrustworthy and dumb. I was inspired to knit that burdensome skin, and let both creatures shed it. Hand knitted and sewn over four months in a synthetic gold and black metallic thread that looks like chain-mail/armour, the glittery skin lies on the ground, its long tail travelling across the floor, and curling into a spirl mass just below a knobby tree trunk. Both beautiful and repulsive, the long gash from breast to pelvis marks the body’s exit point.
The suites of collage works that accompany the knitted works arose out of my research into these mythical transformations. I began to imagine which female body parts would remain or be the last to change during a transformation. I found myself imagining arms and hands (as in my sculpture of Daphne), because this body part looks the most like a tree branch, plant, or natural form (like coral). It also feels linked to the practice of knitting as the hands perform the craft. The larger works were created by collecting beautiful images of women’s hands in different sizes and skin tones from magazines and freely arranging them until some other, non-human form emerged. The smaller series of works came from combining images of plant life from National Geographic magazines with stereotypical images of femininity (breasts, eyelashes, high heels, long hair) from fashion magazines. The hybrid forms are part nature, part woman; these could be strange ‘trophies’, far off places, or wild, new bodies.
Kate Just is a Melbourne based artist who has exhibited across Australia. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and prizes from Arts Victoria, City of Melbourne, Siemen’s and Melbourne Art Fair and has undertaken residencies at the Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery and Heide Museum of Modern Art. She is a current studio resident at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, and lectures in painting at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Alice Lang
Artist Statement: My practice investigates the possibilities for sewn sculpture to explore, and complicate, the relationships between concepts of the decorative and the grotesque, particularly their association with depictions of femininity. I reference both foreign and familiar bodily elements to create hybrid objects/organisms that create tension between the familiar and the unknown, and the feminine and the grotesque. There is a tumorous tactility between the newly formed object and familiarity of the materials from which it is made. It is this tension between form and formlessness, and allure and repulsion that is central to my practice.
This new series of work experiments with the integration of hard and soft sculptural elements through the integration of bone like sculpted pieces into the works surface to create a diverse texture as if some of the fabric flesh has calcified. Familiar bone formations such as ribs and pelvises are transformed into decorative objects as they become soft, malleable, braided and frilled.
Born in Byron Bay in 1983, Alice Lang is an Australian artist currently based in Brisbane. In 2004, Alice completed her Honours in Visual Arts at Queensland University of Technology and was awarded the Queensland Art Gallery Hobday and Hingston Bursary. Her work was included in Fresh Cut at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane and she was artist in residence at Metro Arts, Brisbane in 2005. She was artist in residence at the Klondike Institute for Art and Culture in Dawson City, Canada and was announced winner of the pictures category of the Qantas Spirit of Youth Awards in 2006. Alice took part in her first international exhibition “The Last Vestige” in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in July 2007.
Artists involved:
Kate Just (Melbourne)
Alice Lang (Brisbane)
Curator: Bree Jackson
Kate Just
Artist Statement: Natural Woman is a solo show of works I have prepared over the last year and a half: My Daphne, Shed That Skin, and a suite of collages entitled You Make Me Feel and Natural Woman.
My Daphne, inspired by the Greek myth of the same name, was the first of the works produced and marked a new direction in my work, a conscious turn toward using knitted sculpture to reinterpret mythologies which outline a strong connection between women and nature. In the myth, archer Eros creates a terrible curse with his two arrows, one tipped in gold, one blunted and tipped with lead. The arrow dipped in gold has the power to create insatiable lust in a person, while the other creates absolute abhorrence towards all things romantic and passionate. The arrow dipped in gold strikes Apollo, but the arrow dipped in lead strikes fair Daphne. Apollo gives chase to Daphne, desperate for her love, but she wants nothing to do with him, and runs from him endlessly, eventually begging her river-god father Peneus to transform her into a laurel tree. When Apollo reaches the laurel tree, he is still enamored with Daphne, and holds the tree in a special place in his heart forever.
My Daphne focuses on the last moment of transformation, her fair knitted arm the only human vestige remaining, reaching, patting at the place where her head would be. My Daphne has no man-in-chase, or discomfort in her changing state. She chooses transformation, not as a form of escape, but for the chance to become ‘one’ with nature. The entire scene is encased in a knitted, ‘feminine’ surface which binds and protects.
Shed That Skin was inspired by paintings I saw in Europe by Van der Goes, Michelangelo, Hieronymous Bosch and Tiepolo which image the serpent tempting Eve (Adam is generally sort of hanging around nearby) with fruits from the Tree of Knowledge. Biblical descriptions and these paintings portray the serpent as a beautiful woman on the top and a snake on the bottom. Her face tilts towards Eve in sisterhood or slight sexual provocation; sometimes her hands and expression mirror Eve’s. This early story and centuries of its retelling marks snakes as dark, evil creatures and women as conniving, easily tempted, untrustworthy and dumb. I was inspired to knit that burdensome skin, and let both creatures shed it. Hand knitted and sewn over four months in a synthetic gold and black metallic thread that looks like chain-mail/armour, the glittery skin lies on the ground, its long tail travelling across the floor, and curling into a spirl mass just below a knobby tree trunk. Both beautiful and repulsive, the long gash from breast to pelvis marks the body’s exit point.
The suites of collage works that accompany the knitted works arose out of my research into these mythical transformations. I began to imagine which female body parts would remain or be the last to change during a transformation. I found myself imagining arms and hands (as in my sculpture of Daphne), because this body part looks the most like a tree branch, plant, or natural form (like coral). It also feels linked to the practice of knitting as the hands perform the craft. The larger works were created by collecting beautiful images of women’s hands in different sizes and skin tones from magazines and freely arranging them until some other, non-human form emerged. The smaller series of works came from combining images of plant life from National Geographic magazines with stereotypical images of femininity (breasts, eyelashes, high heels, long hair) from fashion magazines. The hybrid forms are part nature, part woman; these could be strange ‘trophies’, far off places, or wild, new bodies.
Kate Just is a Melbourne based artist who has exhibited across Australia. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and prizes from Arts Victoria, City of Melbourne, Siemen’s and Melbourne Art Fair and has undertaken residencies at the Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery and Heide Museum of Modern Art. She is a current studio resident at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, and lectures in painting at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Alice Lang
Artist Statement: My practice investigates the possibilities for sewn sculpture to explore, and complicate, the relationships between concepts of the decorative and the grotesque, particularly their association with depictions of femininity. I reference both foreign and familiar bodily elements to create hybrid objects/organisms that create tension between the familiar and the unknown, and the feminine and the grotesque. There is a tumorous tactility between the newly formed object and familiarity of the materials from which it is made. It is this tension between form and formlessness, and allure and repulsion that is central to my practice.
This new series of work experiments with the integration of hard and soft sculptural elements through the integration of bone like sculpted pieces into the works surface to create a diverse texture as if some of the fabric flesh has calcified. Familiar bone formations such as ribs and pelvises are transformed into decorative objects as they become soft, malleable, braided and frilled.
Born in Byron Bay in 1983, Alice Lang is an Australian artist currently based in Brisbane. In 2004, Alice completed her Honours in Visual Arts at Queensland University of Technology and was awarded the Queensland Art Gallery Hobday and Hingston Bursary. Her work was included in Fresh Cut at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane and she was artist in residence at Metro Arts, Brisbane in 2005. She was artist in residence at the Klondike Institute for Art and Culture in Dawson City, Canada and was announced winner of the pictures category of the Qantas Spirit of Youth Awards in 2006. Alice took part in her first international exhibition “The Last Vestige” in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in July 2007.