OFLUXO

In the south of England there is a large wilderness which bears the name, New Forest. The placename alone is the best part of a thousand years old; the woodland is far older, ancient even.

What is deemed ‘new’ is always relative. In everyday use, ‘new’ is used to describe something novel or current, of this present moment—something somehow different from before. Yet when we consider the use of this word in the naming of places, its meaning points to other things: that a place has come into someone’s possession either by ‘discovery’ or conquer; and moreover, that it is maybe analogous to another place, another forest.

This exhibition brings together new work by Melbourne-based artists Kathy Temin and André Piguet. Though on the surface each artist’s practice is different, there are synergies in their use of language, interest in child’s play and the emergence of new hybrid forms (in both figuration and formal abstraction).

Included in the show are two of Temin’s iconic soft sculptures: a statuesque lone ‘ball tree’ in radiant chartreuse, and a smaller wall relief––a garden of three trees in forest green. Fabricated in her hallmark synthetic fur, these curious objects oscillate wonderfully between Seussesque cartoon landscape, seventies interiors kitsch, and totem-like modernist sculpture—think Barbara Hepworth or Constantin Brâncusi.

Temin explores the intersections of cultural, personal and historic memory through the garden, and cites the influence of her father’s history of displacement as driving her concern. In both her large-scale installations and smaller domestic sculptures, she deliberately and repeatedly uses abstracted and idealised topiary-like tree forms  monochrome. In the smaller scaled works she engages with modes of display from thehome such as the shelf and sideboard for the trees to be based on. For her monumental scaled works she combines sentimentality through soft material and monumentality through scale, for Temin it is important to read these manicured landscapes as spaces to remember and to celebrate life, while also asking the question of what a monument or a memorial can be.*

Piguet’s work is also a consideration of landscape. In the main space are three works from his ongoing series, Port Duckula. Intended as working studies, a distorted anamorphic image of Count Duckula forms their basis. The heavily elongated or stretched image appears correct when viewed from an oblique angle—as famously seen with the skull featured in Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors (1533).
When asked about his use of Count Duckula, Piguet’s response was two-fold. He felt drawn to the cartoon’s satirical misanthropic character—perhaps as a further nod to Holbein’s skull and the memento mori trope: death amidst life. Yet the artist also states that the image was merely used as a scaffold––a mesh upon which to insert a series of iterative and formal colour tests. Indeed each drawing is heavily layered, worked and reworked. In addition, the use of the word ‘port’in the series title—as in an opening or access point in a computer system—further suggests that the artist be machine-like: abstracting or operating with disregard for meaning.