110. Camille Seriser | Fringe dwellers

Made last September at Laughing Waters, an artist’s residency located about 30 kilometers from Melbourne in protected bush land managed by Parks Victoria, these photographic works by Camille Serisier investigate our connection, or lack there of, with the natural environment.

Growing up in Wollongong on the South Coast, ‘the bush was where you went to get away from adults and explore personal freedoms’, described Camille, a zone of escapism and dreams. It is the environment of Fringe Dwellers, the title of this exhibition. 

Her works ask, ‘Are we merely stage players in this grand environment? Where does mythology and reality meet? Camille sets about exploring narrative construction and interpretation, taking the traditional gendered narrative of the Australian bush and applying an eco-feminist critique. 

Here a figure is inserted into a painterly landscape, masked with abstracted fragments that add to the dramatic ‘stage craft’ of the image. It is not surprising to learn that Camille undertook additional training as a scenic painter at Scenic Studios in Melbourne and Opera Australia in Sydney, following her art degree. 

Dispatch 

This installation comes to SLOT from Current Project @ Ryan Renshaw in Brisbane as part of the Dispatch project connecting seven window galleries across Australia through the exchange of exhibitions.  

Lisa Woolfe lives on the edge of the Manly Dam catchment area – 270 hectares of dense bush that is her persistent landscape, her memories and her inspiration, as she says:

“I bush walk through it and jog along the paths. I am interested in looking at my subject from the inside out, exploring the experience of being in it, how it moves or does not, how it interacts with me or how the elements interact with each other, how it sounds, smells, it’s scale and textures.”

As an artist who holds drawing at the heart of her practice, the sense of hand and gesture in this delicate installation of kozo (rice paper) fuses an Asian aesthetic with one that is quintessentially Australian. Lisa’s simple drawn forms are eloquent and elegant, they capture both the space and light that filters through a grove of trees, or coppice. She captures the spirit of the landscape, its peaceful resilience, which at this time of year also speaks of fire. Lisa added, “The work explores the relationships between the elements, the spaces between and the rhythms of the bush landscape; all of which are part of the experience of being deep within it.”

This is the fourth iteration of this installation; Coppice continues to find its own 

organic expression in acrylic and ink on the delicate paper, waxed to a robust translucency then collaged into varying configurations that, like a coppice, is open to growth.

This piece is an experiment. It is an expansion of a flat, 2 dimensional collage into a 3 dimensional installation suspended in space.

Beginning with small paper constructions that Julia could hung on her wall like paintings, she dramatically increased the size of the elements she was working with. Strengthening her coloured papers with cardboard to hold them rigid, while maintaining the lightness of her original collages.

Her rendering in high-vis colours promotes enormous visually activity across the surface of the work ensuring that it hovers in our eyes between a 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional object. 

It maintains a beguiling presence in the window that in Julia’s eyes is an exercise in understanding painting. Considering the planar relationships of abstraction in a physical form to understand how they fill space and react to tonal variations imposed by light falling across a permeable surface. As she comments “Only through making, can it become painting with knowing.” 

Julia graduated from the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW in 2010. 

 In my art making I find myself observing, more or less randomly generated accidents moving towards apparently precise compositions. It is the process of inventing meaningfulness. Recently I read a statement by Robert Hughes quoted by John McDonnell’s in his weekly column of art criticism - “The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning”, I wondered, was Robert Hughes explaining how we might invent meaningfulness?

This piece titled Found Object-Hood considers that proposition. It presents a tube like work collaged with ideograms that articulate a creation myth that I invented and made in 1989. Alongside are some timber off-cuts collected and inadvertently stacked a couple of weeks ago in my studio during a periodic clean up. 

I am wondering how much of the narrative that is inherent and habitual in my art practise might leach into an activity as lightly considered as stacking timber? Would my narrative surface in a mundane activity or would it be reserved for intentional art making? Could there be a truth in my activity that balances intent and inevitability?

Difficult questions for sure but I am reminded of the inadvertent, unintentional and accidental art generated by people in the 3rd world when building the necessities of life out of the available material. Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say but I can’t help noticing that it also delivers a sense of humanity to mundane creations, which may be an example of the way feeling passes to meaning as Robert Hughes describes. You are welcome to measure the humanity captured in each of my 2 offerings - a randomly generated accident and a precise composition.

Tony Twigg 

S.A. Adair is an installation artist of great intuitive understanding working at the edge where conventional drawing meets ephemeral sculpture. She works in a wide range of materials and in this case, felt. This is a reinstallation of her piece No Conclusion, drawn from her solo exhibition Thin Blue Line (2012). She says of her work:

“I draw on processes of abstraction to create organic forms that hint at the human matrix; random cell-like structures operate on an open plane creating a type of internal mapping. Forms and ideas are generated through experimentation where chance and errors have an integral part to play in the development of the work. I like to think that my work functions as an undercurrent, a murmuring - whispering to the viewer and encouraging subtle reflections of self, space and environment.”

A little over three years ago when Roger Foley-Fogg Australia’s doyen of Psychedelic lighting design proposed a work to Slot he said that he would like it to be in the cooler months of the year so that he would warm the street with his art. Some time later he thought of coordinating his work with VIVID, Sydney’s winter festival of light.

This year Roger’s third contribution and his second collaboration with Jess Cook the artistic Director of 107 Projects at 107 Redfern Street Redfern that will host an expansion of Slots pirate-participation in VIVID by exhibiting two of Rogers wall based light works.

In comparison to the soaring production values of VIVID, Redfern’s offering is almost a community art event. And like the Foley-Fogg/Cook collaboration exhibited in SLOT it is more a spontaneous response to light and space than the highly devised visual rhetoric of VIVID.

Across its long lifetime Redfern has been a counter point to Sydney’s city. An industrial heat land – the black heart in a white city and now a flame of nightlife is flickering at the edge of Sydney’s institutionalised pleasure-domes. And where the cold streets of night are warmed courtesy of Fog and Co.

Two artists go for a walk at Kamay (Botany Bay) . 

SLOT sits at the beginning of Botany Road. This exhibition takes us to the other end where the city meets the sea in a landscape that proposed a conversation between two artists - Jan Fieldsend and Marie McMahon.

Marie describes her work: “Washed Up as an installation of 37 found objects…  jettisoned from houses to lighten the load of material life…  thrown out like the flotsam of a shipwreck, sunk like derelict cargo, cast out like wreckage, (then) cast ashore by the sea…I looked at Bracket Fungi along the heath track, Pumice and worm-worn wood washed up at Cruwee Cove and Cape Banks, and all the other natural and man-made material that wash up there. Much of the work was done before me, by workers of the wood - Huon Pine, 

New Zealand Rima and Japanese Cherrywood. My job was to find the treasure within and to salvage.”

Janice’s installation Cruwee Cove is a delicate spatial collage of found papers and material. She explained that: “Like the place Cruwee Cove, my work is an arrangement of disparate elements – of Gestetner carbon paper, 1990s computer print-out paper and other discarded papers…it is a trove of hidden loves and losses.”

“Cruwee Cove is the first inlet within Kamay (Botany Bay). According to Obed West (1807-1891), Cruwee, was an Aboriginal local who witnessed the arrival of Cook at Kurnell. The small cove now home to a golf course, rescue helicopter pad and bushland, is a site for marine biology experiments and washed-up detritus – every type of plastic imaginable, wood, pumice, the bones of mutton birds and shells. From here migrations of the great leviathans – container ships and whales – pass out to the ocean. On the way there we walk on lichen-encrusted ancient sandstone carved by the wind and water, WW2 embattlements, weed infestations, Kangaroo Grass and then look out across the Tasman Sea towards New Zealand and down towards 

Wollongong.”

All this, at the other end of our road! Both Jan and Marie share their passion for this forgotten treasure of a landscape so close, so remote.

Judy’s sculptural collage adopts the universal symbol of e-commerce and constructs it from antiquated technology: brick-sized mobile phones, data chips from superseded products, circuit boards, transistor radios and fax machines all set against the facsimile of a data stream. And commented on her work in a poetic lament.

e Wasted

I don’t send regular hand written letters anymore

I get e mail

I read e newspapers

I send e Christmas cards 

I receive e newsletters

I generate e messages

I use e remote controls

I am creating e waste

Judy Bourke

This exhibition brings together two distinctly different artists who hold much in common. As SLOT sits within a landscape of interruptions – of traffic and people passing, of moments between here and there – this exhibition captures ‘the creative process of interruption’, as Sue Bessell puts it. 

In a similar way, Jody Graham’s sculptural assemblages are interruptions to the narrative of found objects pressed into a new purpose by her work.

Sue adds: “In unsettling the relationship between the photographic image and its corresponding reality, a space of contestation opens up, where new meanings and experience are located, where the liminal self resides…These intuitive interruptions of the photographic surface create an unstable image that…(transforms) self portraiture into self representation”

A sentiment echoed by Joni, “There is a joy in making art from materials that 

originally were used for a completely different purpose”. And finally she describes her assemblages as “Almost always female or androgynous they are bold and strong. A feminist ethic informs the works.”

This exhibition has been facilitated by Mai Nguyen-Long as part of Slot’s Illawarra Series.