'Found', sea charts and cotton 120x120cm (on completion)
"And they went along, and they went along", so the story goes according to Henny Penny, which precisely describes my practice at present, only without the rooster, duck, goose, turkey or fox and none of that sky falling stuff.
I guess my point is that I am happily producing both ideas and art works for the sake of it, with no consideration to theoretical background. It is very liberating and a little disconcerting. Does it matter that I have no idea what my work is about? Not at the moment. My studio practice, the producing of work and resolution of ideas is of greater importance to me at present than trying to understand any deeper meaning.
I have been looking at the work of Rosalie Gasgoine. She is most well known for her wall based assemblages made from disused wooden creates and reflective road signs. Rosalie herself was a collector (hoarder) of found objects or discarded materials, particularly anything that had been exposed to the elements and weathered, something that already had a story and a life embedded in it. Most of her collections were rescued from the local rubbish tips around Canberra where she lived. This began in the 1960's before tips became a place of order and cleanliness, when recycling was not a catch-phrase and before the burning and burying of junk.
Rosalie's art works are about the material and the arrangement of the material, not the theory. Her assemblages speak of mass, repetition, pattern, colour, shape. Collections of singular objects are arranged to create something larger and evoke the landscape and times past without nostalgia.
Maybe the sky falling is not such a bad thing, after all it allows you to view life from a different perspective.
http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/galleries/australian/featured-works/gascoigne/
