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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.
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Show
Court 3
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Catalogue essay
by Jane O’Neill:
SHOW COURT 3
A curious and often remarked upon aspect of Australian art history is that
many of its key stylistic innovations have been the result of local artists’
reliance on poor reproductions in order to keep in touch with developments
overseas: grainy black and white photos of works shown in Europe and North
America have inspired Australian artists to produce works which, had they
been exposed to foreign art in the original, might never have come into
existence. Such events are bound to happen less often now, with the efficient
dissemination of images through advanced technology; but the spectacle
of Show Court 3, staged outdoors at Melbourne Olympic Parks, is the result
of just such a mis-interpretation.
The exhibition was inspired by an image of The Happy Ending of Franz
Kafka’s Amerika; a work presented by Martin Kippenberger at the Museum
Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 1994. Kippenberger’s installation
consisted of a great number of tables and pairs of chairs placed in various
interview settings and arranged across what appears to be an indoor sports
stadium. The pieces of furniture recall different eras of design. Kippenberger,
in a discussion about the work, remarked that “everyone will remember
a chair that embodies something or other, and then you are transported
to that time, as if you were carrying around a visual encyclopaedia with
you”.[1] Kippenberger’s use of a sporting stadium as a backdrop emphasised
the degree to which the modern interview situation is like a sporting
event, in the sense that it requires strategic action in a rule governed
environment.
When I encountered the first series of Jam Session sculptures by Louise
Paramor at Nellie Castan Gallery in 2006, I was reminded of an image
I had seen of Kippenberger’s work. Paramor’s works recall the culture
of the discarded; plastic items mostly gleaned from the jumbles of rubbish
placed at street kerbs. Her works share with Kippenberger’s, “the whole
idiom of the found, mixed up with reproductions and with self-designed
ideas”[2] Paramor’s use of furniture to evoke the absurd nature of human
interactions also struck a familiar chord.
In jam sessions a white sun lounge wrapped around a rocking horse conjures
notions of containment, perhaps the swaddling of a child or a type of
pregnancy. Botticelli's Venus is recalled as a shelf penetrated with
hosing rises up out of a blue clam-shell […]. The general ambience is
that of a deserted kindergarten or playground, leaving the viewer in
a similarly isolated position.[3]
As a result of the similarity I perceived between Kippenberger’s work
and Paramor’s, I approached the artist and suggested a sporting stadium
as an exhibition venue for the sculptures. Only once the search for a
venue was underway did I discover that Kippenberger had in fact fabricated
the look of an indoor soccer field within a museum; The Happy Ending
of Franz Kafka’s Amerika, complete with astroturf backdrop was re-staged
at the Tate Modern in 2006.
As is often the case when an attempt is made to stage a contemporary
art project outside of the gallery, the idea was met with doubt by officials
at the sport centre. A major concern was that the sculptures would damage
the surface of the court. To allay such fears, Paramor trundled an example
of her sculpture to the meeting: a white plastic chair with hosing of
various colours protruding. The fact that this chair was exactly the
sort that officials at tennis tournaments sit on convinced the court
managers that the sculptures could cause no harm, and so a date was set.
When viewing exhibitions at art galleries, it is common to see the art
in the context of other work exhibited in that particular space. Here,
at Melbourne Olympic Parks, Paramor’s exhibition tended to be seen and
compared with the other forms of mass entertainment the venue has hosted.
The sculptures created a jarring visual disruption when placed in a location
normally associated with play and movement. The stadium seating surrounding
the tennis court incited an expectation of frenetic entertainment; a
number of viewers sat looking at the sculptures, as though waiting for
them to spin and jump around. For most, the exhibition reversed the usual
role of visitors to such stadia: at such places one generally sits and
watches others move; here the objects on the tennis court were static,
it was the spectators who moved around.
The installation offered a kaleidoscope of juxtapostions and interpretations.
Some of the works hinted at the theme of tennis. A bulbous red and black
form suggested the shape of a ball machine and the lines of a black milk
crate resonated with those of the court net. The collection invited the
viewer to a game of playful exploration: searching out repetitions of
particular objects, colours or shapes. The recurring use of balls, hula
hoops and baby baths created a sense of structure and continuity across
the sculptures, while colour provided a rhythm. The idiosyncratic palette
of domestic plastics became apparent: the vividness of its hot pinks,
the rarity of its purples. Children gravitated to the cubby houses, hula-hoops
and sandpits, frustrated by their playful appearance. Mothers recognised
the baby baths and children’s furniture as objects no longer confined
to the world of everyday drudgery. It was possible for every viewer to
form fresh visual and tactile connections with materials which had otherwise
had their place in the mundane operations of domestic life.
Overwhelmingly though, the works address not only our experience of inanimate
objects but also human interaction. Much of Paramor’s practice deals
with the themes of love and sexuality. Through these sculptural pieces
the artist expresses the surprising complexity of human physicality.
…because the objects Paramor collects are designed for the human body,
above all for hands and arses, the jam sessions acquire anthropomorphic
qualities, even characters of their own, at once innocent and faintly
obscene.[4] For instance, the way the artist jams things into each other
seems to mimic the sex act. In one work, the two poles that protrude
from a bin resemble legs splayed wide in the air. Elsewhere mint green
baby baths are configured so as to resemble the smooth head of a penis.
Staged within a sporting arena, we might well regard the exhibition as
a tournament of fictional calisthenics.
There is a thirty minute video film of the installation and de-installation
of the exhibition.[5] It emphasises the physicality of the artist’s involvement.
We see her moving about the court carefully placing each of the works.
While the photographic documentation presents the work as a finished
product, in the video the exhibition appears a kind of marathon event.
For Paramor, it was indeed an act of physical and mental endurance. In
the lead up to the exhibition, the artist spent a year systematically
collecting items, cleaning the plastic, creating the works, dismantling
the works, labelling, packing and storing the pieces. In exhibition week,
the works were packed, unpacked, placed, assembled and exhibited. As
the artist staggered to the finish line on the last rainy day of the
exhibition, the works were dismantled, thrown in the back of a truck
and driven away.
[1] Roberto Ohrt, Kippenberger. Cologne: Taschen, Cologne,
1997, p.183
[2] ibid, p.18
[3] Jane O’Neill, A Bunch of Flowers, Perth Institute of Contemporary
Art, Western Australia, 2006.
[4] Justin Clemens, Show Court 3, The Monthly magazine, July 2007, p.
65.
[5] Filmed by Annie Wilson the film is shot at intervals of 1 second
every thirty for the installation and de-installation of the exhibition.
Show Court 3 was reviewed in Realtime Magazine,
The Monthly Magazine and The Herald Sun newspaper.
The time-lapse DVD of the installation of Show Court 3 and seven Jam
Session sculptures were included in the travelling exhibition Under
My Skin (2008/9), an Asialink project curated by Sarah Bond and
Georgia Sedgwick.
Under My Skin was shown at Ateneo Art Gallery,
Manila, The Phillipines; Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore and Samuso:
Space for Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea. |
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