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27 June - 21 July 1996: UNDER THE PIER Sue Pedley Sue Pedley's work addressed fundamental ideas of making, of change, and of process. Activity and labour were bought to bear on materials, and the space that they occupied, over the ten days that the artist spent in the gallery constructing the work. This produced an installation that carried the signs and traces of its own development and the histories of a working and re-working. The changes and shifts that were effected on the material objects through direct engagement and recombination also changed the placing of the elements of the installation in formal and conceptual categories. They resisted their positioning within the discrete arenas of drawing or sculpture, crafted object and found object, natural or manufactured. Rather the evidence of past transformation and labour caused them to become fluid and mercurial, playfully imposing their tentative autonomy, momentarily, as themselves, rather than as representative of a category. UNDER THE PIER used grasses, plastic, thread, cloth, sand, paper, cardboard, to build itself. It contained work made elsewhere which was represented, reconfigured, and recycled in the new matrix. During installation, the form of the work grew and shifted; reacting to the space, to accidents, to the generation of new elements. The work continued to change - at the micro level, as well as the macro - the humidifiers scattered around the gallery encouraged the plaster to 'breathe', as it absorbed and discharged water, causing the pigments put into the plaster to expand and contract. |
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