growing pains
july 14-23rd 2023
wreckers artspace, woolloongabba
accessible word doc of the exhibition text here.
installation photos courtesy of louis lim
'growing pains' is my first solo exhibition, a process-based elaboration on my previous bod of work exploring my lived experiences with chronic pain and illness. With reference to the site of Wreckers Artspace's history as a motorcycle wrecker, the gallery becomes a place of un- and re-becoming for sculptural and material metaphors of the body.
capillary tensions [soy wax, cotton thread, copper wire]
Consistent throughout is the material language of soy wax, cotton thread, and paper, that hold visual connotations to the internal architecture of the body - bones, vessels and tissues. I first used these connotations about a year ago, and have continued to play within this language, trying to push the extremes of its physical, literal and symbolic potential as a material code. 'growing pains' includes a variety of these extremes, from more literal references to the body, through text and anatomic figuration, and more abstracted material or symbolic dynamics, in order to create a tension between the exhibition as a whole.During the ideation of the pieces, it was important to me to consider these pieces as proxy bodies for my pain. However, as the works developed materially, they naturally shifted away from their personal or anatomical beginnings. In this way, the pieces can become collaborations between my body and material, and material and its environment. By inflicting heat, cold, air, gravity and time upon the works, subject these materials to physical obstacles akin to that of a life with chronic pain. The pieces uphold a human-like stoicism through quietly withstanding these conditions, but still hold formalist beauty as abstract post-materialist sculpture.
performance of until it all subsidesspatchcocked [soy wax, cotton thread]
evidence-based / lived-experience
[soy wax, paper sourced from ‘pain: a textbook for therapists’ first ed.]