GRACE MARLOW (SA) - NOT

Opening - 5:30 PM - Wednesday, 3rd August

Artist Talks - 6:00pm

Running - 4th August 2016 - 20th August 2016

As a maker my decisions are lead by my body and its playful interactions with materials. This relationship generates new objects (sculptures) at the same time as it generates alternative uses for objects, bodies and spaces. The situations that my body and materials are in do not comply with normative uses or understandings of these objects, or of my body. This way of working considers following bodily cues to form conversations through sculptural practice, an act of bodily resistance whereby I strive to produce work outside assumptions of where things belong, how they should belong, what they should do. This produces sculptures that resist only operating within visibility and identification but that conversely use tactics of avoidance, refusal, and withholding. These are modes that can be embodied within abstract practice to provide spaces for bodies to navigate in new ways; if we do not recognise the use of objects and their relation to our bodies—chair is for sitting, sculpture is not—how do bodies negotiate abstracted objects?

Sculpture objects can effect bodies to perceive, engage, and exist differently even after we leave the art space. Many aspects of identity are normalised and made comfortable through taught interactions with objects, bodies and spaces–gender performativity is one of these positions. not, by prompting alternative engagements with familiar things, prompts engagements with alternative identities. I borrow from languages, behaviours, and symbols that construct rigid perceptions of gender, recontextualising these systems to render them unfamiliar. By de-familiarising objects, not emphasises the failures of categories to suffice for experience and the complexities of being.