Summits and Temporal Ruins
Nicola McClelland
Factory 49
Sydney
11–20 October, 2018
VIEW SLIDESHOW AT theguthrieproject.com
Nicola McClelland’s latest solo exhibition, Summits and Temporal Ruins, amalgamates refined monochrome coordinates-mementoes, removed from the architectural site that was once the artist’s home, with the raw detritus of urbanscapes – concrete, cardboard, plastic and asphalt. McClelland’s process-driven practice embodies a language that resonates literally and metaphorically in uncertain cultural and geographical contexts.
“Verse grows from rubbish and this is the unconscious
and unforgiving poetry of objects. From forgetfulness
they rescue the abandoned thing, the used up, orphaned
thing-and return it to life”*
The embedded essence of structures, objects and atmospheres were removed, in the form of monochrome coordinate-mementoes, from a architectural site that was once the artist’s home. Transitioning across vastness and scaled up, they were rebuilt through memory and imagination by amalgamating them with detritus of urban ruins–cardboard, plastic, concrete and asphalt. The corners and edges of places that can never sit alongside each other in real space-time, combine to form temporal markers.
There are cycles of flux in these shifting planes and plateaux. What is our perception from the summits of these new forms? What recedes, what expands skywards and what reforms at ground level?
Nicola McClelland’s practice is process-driven, combines and manipulates materials in unconventional ways and resonates both literally and metaphorically. Her processes generate paradoxes between the nature of the materials and their appearance: light/heavy, soft/hard, balanced/imbalanced and temporal/permanent. Her work embodies a language that speaks of uncertain contemporary cultural and geographical contexts.
*Peter D. Osborne. Milton Friedman’s Smile: Travel Culture and the Poetics of a City. Ed. Erica Carter. Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993. 346.
I would like to thank Carl Daamen, Amarie Bergman, Justine Henry and Harriet Tarbuck for their support and contributions to Summits and Temporal Ruins.