| |
Created for the ‘Buddha Enlightened 2BE’ international workshop organised by Delhi based artists Sanjeev Sinha and Dianne Hagen. ‘Buddha Enlightened 2BE’ took place in Bodhgaya, Bihar, India in January 2011.
Stupa City is comprised of four sets of works. The starting point is a group of figurative paper collages assembled from the residue of an earlier work (Letters, Lies & Alibis, 2004). The forms of these characters have been increased in scale to form the second set of works, painted onto glass, creating a different sensibility again, where geometric abstraction meets cubist funk.
Award winning piece, created specifically for the McClelland Sculpture
Survey and Award, Victoria.
Six permanent public sculptures commissioned
for COSTCO Wholesale Australia, situated at the foot of the Southern Star
Observatory Wheel in Docklands, Melbourne
Mood Bomb was an exhibition of abstract
oil paintings on (the back of) glass. As the title indicates these works
were conceived intuitively and the paintings themselves ultimately suggested
their own titles. Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne.
Tritonic Jam Session
One of an ongoing series that utilises contemporary
industrial plastic detritus to explore fundamental principles of
modernism such as form, colour and spatiality. Melbourne Prize
for Urban Sculpture 2008, Federation Square, Melbourne.
Studio Floor
Studio Floor was created for the
group exhibition Flash, curated by Geoff Newton and Jan
Duffy, at Linden – St Kilda Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne.
Square
Square was an exhibition of abstract
canvases at Turner Galleries, Perth, Western Australia.
Created specifically for the 2008 Helen
Lempriere National Sculpture Prize Exhibition, Werribee Mansions,
Victoria
Show Court 3 was a 3-day event which
involved setting up 75 sculptures in a professional outdoor tennis
court. Curated by Jane O’Neill, Rod Laver Arena Complex, Melbourne
Olympic Parks
Created specifically for the 2007 Helen
Lempriere National Sculpture Prize Exhibition, Werribee Mansions,
Victoria
A Bunch of Flowers showcased three distinct
groups of works: the first of many plastic assemblage Jam Session sculptures;
three large bill-board scale Classic Shazzy car/girl collages and several
large abstract collage works.
Up She Goes is a 4-minute video loop
where the hanging of a large collage work (in pieces) is reversed and
sped up, with sound added. Linden – St Kilda Centre for Contemporary
Arts, Melbourne
Letters, Lies & Alibis was
created for the exhibition Non-Stopp, a collaborative
project by Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek and Louise Paramor at Project
Space, RMIT University, Melbourne
FOREVERYOURS is a series of
large collages meticulously assembled using pre-hand-painted gloss
paper, which is cut into numerous shapes and then pasted to form images.
This imagery comprises a variety of over-scaled interpretations of
the Mills and Boon series’ covers.
Off-cuts was an exhibition of the
first in a series of abstract collages constructed from the refuse
of the FOREVERYOURS series of collages. Künstlerhaus Bethanien,
Berlin
Articulated around the theme of eroticism, The
Love Artist presents itself as an installation in three complementary
parts. Breitengraser – room for contemporary sculpture, Berlin.
Made specifically for the exhibition Elvis
Has Just Left the Building, Perth Institute of Contemporary
Art , Western Australia and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin,
curated by Boris Kremer.
Heart-On was an exhibition of honey-comb
paper sculptures, found objects and borrowed text, and was created
during a 3-month residency at IASKA
Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany
Made specifically for the National Sculpture
Prize Exhibition, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Breitengraser – room for contemporary sculpture, BerlinLustgarten was a series of
large-scale ‘honey-comb’ paper sculptures, produced during a one-year Australia
Council Fellowship at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany.
|
|
A
Bunch of Flowers
|
A Bunch of Flowers showcased
three distinct groups of works: the first of many plastic assemblage Jam
Session sculptures; three large bill-board scale Classic Shazzy car/girl
collages and several large abstract collage works.
Sculpture used to be about removing the bits that weren’t sculpture.
The everyday plastic items that Paramor gathers from Op shops and dumpsters
don’t have sculptures hidden within them. They become sculptures when
colours jar or harmonise, when internal volume and external projection
are mated effectively, when humble utility gives way to structure and
monument.
Louise Paramor shows that you can put a square peg into a round
hole. But it’s not simply a matter of brute force. Mashing found objects
together at random doesn’t make for sculpture. It’s more a case of
finding objects that don’t know that they’re sculptures and convincing
them to be more ambitious.
Only then do the subtle echoes of earlier aesthetic debates become
audible. Are these assemblages art because they render the functional
non-functional? As Malevich suggested, a vase becomes art when you
stop putting flowers in it. Or are they art because they so cleverly
sidestep the scholastic debates about colour and sculpture? Minimalists
and formalists alike fretted on the problem of colour applied to sculpture.
Paramor simply uses plastics whose colour is embedded within the very
material during the manufacturing process.
Intriguing reflections for an art historian, should he find a quiet
moment. But in the studio, it’s clear that what makes these assemblages
art is the element of improvisation and play that propels them. Making
involves matching disparate items through a process of trial and error,
of playing with the pieces until they speak effectively with each other.
Then they achieve a kind of classical disinterestedness; they are purposefully
without purpose.
Paramor’s large painted paper collages, which enlarge images from
calendars, show a different kind of play. The process of translating
an image into blocks of colour, then pasting together a simplified,
paint-by-numbers version of it, reminds me of school craft projects
and TV art programs for kids. The collages aren’t exercises in nostalgia,
however. While the psychedelic Photoshop flourishes of the originals
show how infinitely manipulable an image is, Paramor’s hand-made reiterations
insist on the fundamental formal structure of the image. Like her three-dimensional
constructions, these paper assemblages are a plea for architecture
as a primary characteristic of the art work.
A Bunch of Flowers was also shown at
Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Western Australia in 2006.
The Classic Shazzy collages were created in Rotterdam, The Netherlands
in 2005, during a 3-month residency at Stichting Duende Aktiviteiten.
The solo exhibition entitled Classic Shazzy also took place
at Duende in 2005.
Classic Shazzy 2, was included in the group show Made in
Rotterdam,
Cokkie Snoei Gallery, Rotterdam in 2005. Classic Shazzy 1, was the
feature work for Cokkie Snoei Gallery at the 2005 Amsterdam Art Fair.
The three Classic Shazzy works were included in the group exhibition, Oomph,
Canberra Contemporary Art Space in 2007.
Jam Session #17, is owned by the National Gallery of Victoria.
A Bunch of Flowers was reviewed in The Age newspaper, The West
Australian newspaper and Art Collector Magazine.
|
|
