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Surface Revisions

with Anna Varendorff

Jam Factory

Adelaide, Australia

2018

Surface Revisions

with Anna Varendorff

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A meeting was arranged and a casual studio visit was organised. I had seen Alana's pieces and was mesmerised by the scale, the shapes and the skins of these objects. The nuanced surfaces of the clay bodies allowed for textural explorations not possible in the metal I work in. I was lost in these lunar forms, with their chalky or crystalline concentrations of surface texture and glaze.

 

Conversation began between the two of us, both working always in different cities and in different materials, but in similar scales, and coincidentally with a parallel interest in light.

 

The conversation became translated into the making of collaborative works, conceived of and fabricated in a similar way to the reciprocal nature of our verbal exchange, but in physical form. An idea, a gesture, an object, was passed or posted between us for the recipient to return with an addition, a material contribution, a physical development.

The circle repeated as both strategy and as formal concern in the pieces we were making. Perhaps the completeness of circles, or the open-ness of them? Their natural lack of hierarchy? They presented again and again in the works, contributed by both of us. 

 

To see what creatures can emerge from trying to make single bodies from two skins has been the circular, open ended nature of this project and conversation. Both of us trusting in the final outcomes, we as much the audience to our own work emerging as is the gallery visitor when it is finally on display. 

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- Anna Varendorff

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