FRONT GALLERY: ANNE STEVENS (SA) - UNMADE

February 2021

Making use of non-traditional materials, including studio left-overs, hard rubbish and items from hardware stores, Stevens generates works that attempt to convey the intrigue she finds in the affective qualities of the process of transformation.

George Bataille’s theory of the informe, or formless – ‘to bring things down in the world’ corresponds with Stevens’s conceptual concerns and increasingly informs her practice. Artist, John Barbour interpreted Bataille’s informe as ‘un-form’ where there is an ‘undoing of form and at the same time a yet-to-become of form…”. Barbour coined the term ‘unmade’, the title for this exhibition. The works in this exhibition could be described as unmade objects; a result of a process (humble materials crudely handled) where Stevens makes through unmaking. 

Despite using humble materials, and works often barely made, Stevens does not wish to signify the abject; with Bataille’s informe, everything has equal status. 

Unmade realises works - used stretched canvases, discarded by Stevens, combined with found non-traditional materials - which attempt to subvert traditional unilateral wall-based painting (correlating with Barbour’s unmade object).

[1] Ewen McDonald (ed), John Barbour: HardSoft, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, (Adelaide and Yuill/Crowley, Sydney, 2011), p 9 [2]McDonald, John Barbour, p 18