Anthills Garlands
Rings of Trees
Combing the Shore
Complete Devotion
A
Ways
The stark white space broken by bold letters, Schmick Contemporary becomes a billboard, one where the artist decides what they say. In the hidden gallery’s current show, ‘Between Merit and Hope’, artist Clare Wigney delves further into their interest in questioning the simulations of reality through this sculptural piece.
Wigney, self branded as a painter, breaks this tension between the physical and immaterial nature of contemporary visual culture. Fragmenting and highlighting incomplete images as malleable images, reusing and repurposing something so distinct as a sign that we pass — one in which the meaning and message is at the dictation of the artist. The space at Schmick itself is small; the artist-run initiative (ARI) comprises a room hidden amongst George Street. Its walls, floors and ceiling being given the landlord special with thick layers of white paint in every nook and cranny. However, its Victorian style fireplace and beautiful natural light create an angelic halo over Wigney’s work. The sign is so out of place, if anything it makes me wonder who got stuck carrying it up five flights of stairs.
After interviewing Wigney and curator, Harry de Vries, I found out that it’s way deeper than just a sign, it’s a deviation from painting, a realisation of their interest “in paintings as images, within, and not above, the endless tide of media in contemporary culture”. This work is speculative of how images supplant reality, a new window in which we can perceive and understand the world — taking something informative and certain and turning it into poetry.
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Honi Soit: Tell me about your work for Between Merit and Hope (2024). It is an obvious deviation from your paintings. What inspired this sculptural work?
Clare Wigney: I have always been preoccupied with pictures, or images, so this work is definitely a deviation for me. I am interested in paintings as images, within, and not above, the endless tide of media in contemporary culture. I have been thinking about simulation theory for a long time, and images as supplanting reality, or becoming the windows through which we perceive and understand the world. That is the information age I suppose. The thing that I value about painting the most is that the picture is malleable, being built and destroyed and rebuilt within the creative process. In my own practice I use and look for ambiguity, rendering images that are incomplete, reduced or indecipherable. When I was in undergrad I was interested in pixelation for this reason. These days I utilise the alchemy and materiality of paint itself to conceal or compromise the visual data of an image- removing information and therefore function. I am interested in the act of looking, and when something is unclear, looking further, harder, squinting and thinking. I am interested in images as imitations of reality, and then paintings as duplicates and decoys.
I think there is a lot of humour in making paintings because it is kind of hollow and self important. But I really love painting. I love using the material and making pictures. It feels like a game to me. And sometimes paintings inspire a nice feeling when you look at them. I am interested in the history of painting, and the function of the medium throughout history- as informative, instructional, certain- a medium that for centuries society relied upon to define and project “reality”.
This is where I come to think about signs. Firstly, because I am interested in the circulation and proliferation of images in modern contemporary culture. Signs are overtly proliferating images, information, instruction. They are self important. Signs and symbols, simulacra, information.
A couple of years ago I made two aluminium mock billboards for my first solo show. I’ve done a lot of driving around the country and I feel inspired passing signs, especially in more empty or remote places.
I’ve enjoyed taking something like a sign- solid, informative, certain, and removing the clarity or function of its message, in the same way that I do this with images within paintings. The sign is for poems, I treat poetry like fluid ambiguous language, the same as brush marks. Making paintings always feels like a big emotional purge for me, and so does writing poetry. They are really the same thing. In this sculptural work I am forming a picture but through words and not brush marks.
HS: Harry, as curator, what does this show mean to you?
Harry de Vries: I was really excited to give Clare the opportunity to exhibit some more experimental work — I’ve always been drawn to their practice, and we had discussions around how Schmick could provide that. It was also an ambitious curatorial project in terms of the size of the work (the biggest we’ve had so far), and the sparseness of the show (it being a singular work). There was a lot of ephemeral material that surrounded the show and we discussed, stuff that kind of gels the exhibition text and the work together and gives some context, but we wanted to keep that in the background / save it for some ongoing projects, so for me the show is the start of a continued collaboration!
HS: I noticed as well that each letter seems hand painted and cut, what was your process, or what is just repurposing found objects?
CW: Each letter was hand cut and hand painted. I worked with the materials I had at the time. The panel that made up the sign was given to me by a gallery I used to work for, an artist from the UK had left it behind after their show. I painted it, nailed strips of thin ply into it, and got these two sheets of plywood that I had left in my parents garage. They were soaked and damaged by rain so I cleaned them with turps and sanded them and dried them out. Then It was quite a long process of cutting up the wood and tracing and painting the letters. I just painted the letters as I went spelling out a poem. Then I attached metal poles to the back. So the object ended up being half found and half crafted, a strange potion. I enjoy the humour in this. Neither here nor there.
HS: Harry, how did you direct between these two mediums – almost a clash of painting and sculpture?
HdV: I think,speaking as someone who has barely held a brush, this work is still a painting! At least in the most basic sense, it’s effectively paint on a substrate, with a few embellishments.
This work is poetry, which is typically limited by things like metre, verse, and rhyming schemes, etc; in this case, it’s poetry limited by physical space and materials,as something like a visual artwork might be. That’s the crux of the artwork’s concept for me, so I feel like I didn’t direct between the mediums at all. The work is about finding a way between sculpture, poetry, performance and painting.
HS: What are your thoughts on found objects as art? Do any changes have to be made to turn random junk into beautiful art pieces?
CW: Sometimes yes and sometimes not. I think that while the medium is the message, some things are interesting to look at and some things are not. I have a pretty simple attitude towards artworks in that I think of an artwork as anything that feels removed -from the general order of appearances and the ordinary. A bit wrong, a bit off, a bit special. Anything that inspires a closer look or a good feeling or a bad feeling. I see artworks in the world all the time that are just accidents. Anything that is beautiful and there is beauty in hideous and sad things too. A lot of things in the world are accidental artworks and sometimes these chance happenings are more beautiful than when an artist takes a found object and tells you that it is an artwork.
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As someone who stepped into Schmick overwhelmed by the work and a flurry of my own conceptions and meanings, this conversation got to the crux of it — contemporary art is about understanding through confusion.
But the whole show is in fact a ‘merit’ to the burgeoning ARI scene in Sydney, more so the ability to free artists from commercial grapples. Wigney highlights this work as semi-experimental, the sign becomes a header of randomised poetry, tarot card-esque chance and just some of their favourite words. The title itself is a chance experience on the road between two small towns — Merit and Hope. But to me, there is a shared autonomy between work, audience and artist. My first viewing was filled with my own meaning, the words a clear statement and an interest in popular culture especially the absorption of it in Australia, which has always been very western and americanised.
Merit and Hope become more than towns — it is the merit in creative work, and the hope that it is allowed to bloom.
Between Merit and Hope opened September 13 and ran until October 5, at Schmick Contemporary on Level 2, 706 George Street, Chinatown .
