Oblivion

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

- George Bernard Shaw.

 

Oblivion is a word heavy with meaning and the threat thereof is central to the contemporary mindset.

Further to the migrant experience and fears of pending ecological and societal collapse, our complex digital lives can also elicit significant issues and outcomes.

There is a significant movement of artists using craft and the hand-made as a response to these circumstances rather than blindly turning away. They utilise familiar, less alienating tools, skills and mediums to communicate complex ideas.

Artists are uniquely placed to interrogate these issues as they can offer fresh, personal, empathetic and engaging perspectives on complex topics.

 

View the exhibition Purchase the Book Oblivion - An essay by Lee Kinsella Diminishing to a whisper - An essay by Christopher Young View videos related to the project

 

Ruth Halbert

Ruth Halbert is an interdisciplinary artist working with textile processes, installation, text, and storytelling. She uses traditional textile hand-making practices with local and found materials to explore spaces between the often polarised realms of conceptual art and functional craft.

Her practice balances on a thread stretched between the intense localness of living on the south coast and the infinite possibility of interconnection via the net where she accesses information on historic techniques and contemporary practitioners around the world. There is another taut thread which goes back in time, via her invader/coloniser ancestors to their predecessors' handcrafting lives in Britain, especially the hand-weaving towns in Scotland in the mid 19th century.

Ruth makes work in response to specific locations and to historical or political events that reverberate today. She uses cloth and thread to draw out the details of these stories, bringing what’s hidden into view to be confronted and to celebrate what is unique and what is universal.

Ruth Halbert - Artist Website

 

Elisa Markes-Young

Elisa Markes-Young has now been in Australia for almost two decades but she feels a stranger, struggling to navigate between her Polish origins, German influences and Australian surroundings.

Using traditional skills and techniques she has learnt as a child and incorporating folk art motifs, she creates imagery that harks back to her Eastern-European heritage. She creates work that is inspired by memories from her childhood. The work is a result of a profound feeling of displacement and loss but it is not about anguish. It is an attempt to hold on to a moment in time, to prevent it from passing. Markes-Young focuses on positive memories tied to the innocence of childhood to balance the feelings of alienation and not belonging caused by repeated migrations.

The time and effort that go into creating elaborate pieces by hand are, for her, a measure of affect and emotion and their fragility reinforces the work’s conceptual value.

Elisa Markes-Young - Artist Website

 

Katharina Meister

Katharina Meister’s multifaceted drawings and installations leave plenty of room for discovery, association and interpretation. However, despite them being aesthetically appealing, her works refer to the downsides of reality. She extensively investigates climate change and uses her art to “convert scientific facts into visual form to thus offer an additional way to look into this subject.” She calls her work “climate art” and researches the role of creativity in problem solving. She recognises “the tremendous surplus that can be found in the fusion of art and science.”

Meister works mainly with drawing and paper cuts. The ‘black paper cut’ emerged in the middle of the 18th Century. Mediated from England to France and to Germany, the portrait silhouette became an early mass medium and a cultural document of German classical music. Currently the medium is visible across the spectrum of contemporary art. It is understood as a political medium, engaged in social criticism and one that poses existential questions.

Meister’s paper art presents the viewer with the versatility of this material, in the form of delicate drawings, sophisticated paper cuts as well as voluminous sculptures.

Ultimately, the work seeks to encourage people to earnestly reconsider their relationship with nature.

Katharina Meister - Artist Website