|
LOUISE HASELTON
Small Crowd 16 May to 14 June Louise Haselton's practice ranges from small scale sculptural works to site specific wall texts to works on paper, incorporating materials such as bronze, wood, paper, fabric and glass. Pieces function as singular sculptures, one of a larger group or as maquettes for a later larger work. Louise has an ongoing interest in language and has recently explored structures such as palindromes and oxymorons to point to the complexities and allusions within language. Formerly from Adelaide where she completed her undergraduate studies in sculpture, Louise relocated interstate in 1997, and completed her MA at RMIT in 2002. In 2003 Louise was appointed Foundation Studies Coordinator, South Australian School of Art. REVIEW This body of work played-off an obdurate materiality against the bubble-like abstraction of word and concept. The pieces were all, variously, palindromes. It is a conundrum-like combination of the opposing quiddity of material and the abstraction of word: a bi-polar rebus. The result seemed jokily humorous, casual, affectionate - and, in their sequencing and ordering within the space, graceful. And canny: upturned plinths, and display boxes that were still grubby, insisted on an evanescent provisionality, a calm insouciance. It 'felt' like thought in that respect - its fluidity and alternate tenuosness and definition. The occasional smudged and smeared white box support had the artfulness of a Robert Ryman as well as its factual 'presence'. The elegance of the various pieces themselves combined this deliberate facture and this same lightness of touch. The show definitely didn't wish to invoke the term 'heavy'. At the same time the combined works had the presence of a shared real, genuine fascination - a fascination with barely graspable connections (of object and concept, of reading and misreading and the echoes and reverberations of these). Was the high-placed "leper" a misspelled suicide? A "leaper"? No, it was the reverse of "repel". Why were "moor" and "room" linked - "more room"? room for North Africans? room as 'mooring'? Why did the latter pair's manifestation physically, as yoked-together 'tomes', seem right - and more appropriate for the yoking's not being fully achieved? Why did one forget the words at different times and focus on the physicality of the objects, unable, after a time, to tell what question our brains were asking? Cheshire cat-style the words interrogated us again. A final, 'easy' sequence split two-word terms to reveal beneath the unity - hedged bets, ironies, contradiction: small/crowd, almost/exactly, unsung/hero, loose/fit, act/natural. Ken Bolton EVENTS Gallery talk Thursday 29 May 2003 PUBLICATION Invitation/Catalogue: Poster style: A3 folded paper, full colour 2 sides with images by the artist. MEDIA "What's On" - Arts on Monday, The Advertiser, 19 May 2003 Wendy Walker "Talking to the Animals" The Advertiser, Saturday 7 June 2003, page 86 John Barbour "Bridget Currie+Louise Haselton: Scivias+Small Crowd", Broadsheet, Vol 32 No 3, p 33 [artist profile] Ken Bolton " Louise Haselton: Of Material Importance", Broadsheet, Vol 32 No 3, pp 28-29 |
|
|
|
above: documentation: installation details |
Documentation Photography by Lara Thompson |