Group Exhibition @ curated by
Xanthe Scout Lardner-Burke
Xanthe Scout Lardner-Burke
Offcuts
2024
2024
(./you are supposed to be sad at a funeral).
The matter/ the material, simply put: my object-based lexicon. We speak in collaboration with world; an adamancy to remain a part of it or to remind ourselves that we always are (we do not pretend otherwise). We share access and entry through our own relationships to these materials and their use. We point in many directions/we walk towards ourselves.
The matter/ the material, simply put: my object-based lexicon. We speak in collaboration with world; an adamancy to remain a part of it or to remind ourselves that we always are (we do not pretend otherwise). We share access and entry through our own relationships to these materials and their use. We point in many directions/we walk towards ourselves.
Artist breaks the forth wall:
In thinking about how to start or orientate my art and practice, I feel it important to begin with my interest in the language of materials or material as language. Much of my practice makes use of the relationship materials hold within their own lives- in this I mean materials maintain their own uses/I refuse to hold materials too tightly. Making, this way, feels like a collaboration/ a “part” of this world (a consideration of here).
More pointedly, in looking at these materials - for me, bricks (and the brick related) speak directly to ideas of home, structure, and colonial protection. In turn, dust relates to the end of this world and the beginning of a new one (hopeful within the state of home in collapse). Wax feels grief stricken / feels like communication with the dead (objects defy time-lines in their entirely connected ways).
The works in OFFCUTS remain related to these interests / or at least these interests set the scene that this work emerges from. ^However, I decided to work with lighter materials - I prefer doing things alone and both the labour of carrying bricks and the space they take up, felt too dramatic for this exhibition. (I grow attached to certain phrases / questions - using lighter materials - felt related to my current: “Your house is known fire - what are you going to take ?”. Re-directing me towards materials that would be easy to carry under such circumstances - this time, I turned to plaster.
Interview with the curator
AJ:I think, yeah, I've been too much on my computer, or not even a lot on my computer, but it feels accessible, it feels wherever I go. After Michaelis in some ways, I just felt I don't know, I really loved my bricks, but now the heaviness of carrying everything, and moving things to and fro - there's so much drama involved. Whereas with writing, or with kind of computery art, it feels lighter, lighter.
Xanthe:It's interesting thinking about you working in such a shifted way. Computery things definitely don't have the same language as bricks, or things that spill. I think I am thinking of how you’ve also worked with ice - things [materials] that are super transitory whereas text feels a bit like an etching.
AJ:It's funny because it is that, but there's also a bit of - I almost wish I had recorded how the text has transformed over because it's… I'll go back to a text after a month, and then I edit it and do something else.
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