Articulate Upstairs, Leichhardt 2014
For this show I made two composite works, which were located near each other in the project space at Articulate, an art space with a truly creative artistic program.
The Prime Minister at the time, Kevin Rudd, had a habit of getting into his car saying “Thanks everyone – gotta zip,” whenever a reporter had a tough question. If only giving an account of your art practice could be as easy!
A ‘zip’ is also Barnett Newman’s word for the vertical gaps separating the larger areas of colour in his work. In the pendant work, Gotta Zip, the idea was that these conceptual interstices had been isolated and taken off the wall into the gallery space, to be encountered physically.
For the wall work, Doolies, ‘gotta zip’ referred to the way the lines went zipping across the gaps between the wire drawers. As it continues in the space between one physical length of tape and the corresponding tape in the neighbouring work, a line becomes entirely conceptual. So, what was conceptual made physical in the first work was physical made conceptual in the other.
Many thanks to Francesca Mataraga
