Decant installation at Fairfield Museum

Last year I was artist in residence at Fairfield Museum and my resulting project, Decent, is now on display in the museum until 15 November 2014. Decant explores the passage of time and containment of memory, poetically reflected in the residue and trace of pouring water. Responding to two museum objects originally found on the banks of nearby Prospect Creek, Decant was a process based project, where the museum objects where cast and recreated into a series of replicas and delicate shards - intentionally dissected, semi-dissolved, broken and unstable. To read more about Decant, please see kathfries.com

Kath Fries, Decant, 2014, unfired earthenware paper clay and ink in museum display case

Kath Fries, Decant, 2014, unfired earthenware paper clay and ink in museum display case,  
Kath Fries, Decant, 2014, unfired earthenware paper clay and ink in museum display case,  
installation dimensions 200 x 800 x 60 cm

Kath Fries, Decant, 2014, unfired earthenware paper clay and ink in museum display case

Kath Fries, Decant, 2014, unfired earthenware paper clay and ink in museum display case

Kath Fries, Decant, 2014, unfired earthenware paper clay and ink in museum display case

Kath Fries, Decant, 2014, unfired earthenware paper clay and ink in museum display case

Kath Fries, Decant, 2014, unfired earthenware paper clay and ink in museum display case

Kath Fries, Decant, 2014, unfired earthenware paper clay and ink in museum display case


Decent is on display at Fairfield Museum until 15 November 2014

Divest installation - New Materialism exhibition


Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash installation, detail view

Divest is an installation of beewax and ash, which I created for the New Materialism PhD exhibition at Sydney College of the Arts Galleries, Rozelle NSW. This work is being exhibited in accompaniment to the SCA Grad School Conference, Tuesday 9 September 2014, where I presented my paper Beeswax – an ancient material in contemporary art


Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash installation


New Materialism is an emerging trend in 21st century thought in several fields of inquiry, including philosophy, cultural theory, feminism, science studies, and the visual arts. Defined around the primacy of matter and its properties and actions, the New Materialism re-works long-held assumptions about the nature of the stuff of the universe. It responds to the need for novel accounts of agency, nature and social relationships in the contemporary epoch, when new questions have arisen about our place as embodied humans in the world and the ways we produce, reproduce and consume our material environment. In this challenge to invent new ways to understand the contemporary world, the visual arts have a special place given their concern with the manipulation of matter. For the artist or craftsperson in the studio or workshop, New Materialism can articulate and give agency to existing creative processes, and offer opportunities for new modes of authorship and expanded interpretations of materials and objects and our relationships with them.

Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash installation

My interest in New Materialism relates to its consideration of non-human creatures, and all matter, as existing in an interconnected and constantly fluid state of flux, flow and change. This challenges conventional western notions of nature as a separate series of inert stable entities to be exploited by superior humans. The New Materialism discourse sees one of its tasks as creating new concepts and images of nature that affirm matter’s immanent vitality.



Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash installation

This call to rethink how we use and abuse our natural environment, to shift our human-centric focus to consider that non-human things exist for their own ends and have not evolved for human use, is conveyed in the New Materialism re-purposing of the word ‘materiality’ to mean a ‘process’ rather than a ‘thing’.*

Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash installation

Working with a ‘process’ of materiality, which is impermanent and unstable rather than a static series of separate things, is a notion that resonates in my practice. For me, this process is about reconciling myself with my surroundings and the world’s inescapable natural cycles of life and death, destruction and renewal. Since of the death of my father in 2009, most of my work has in some way related to grieving and reflecting on death as a natural unavoidable part of life. In turn, my aim to cultivate an awareness of the vitality of everyday existence reflects a number of ecological issues and concern for the way that we all often feel inherently separated from nature. I respond to this by working with a contemplative process that focuses on embodying sensory experiences of my surroundings, particularly the fragility and flux of time and materiality.

Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash installation

Divest consists of small empty beeswax funnels clustered across the wall and smattered with ash, suggesting abandoned containers of life, hollow shells soon to disintegrate. Made by wrapping warm pieces of beeswax around my fingers in a healing bandaging gesture, the funnels are then pressed into the wall in barnacle like clusters, clinging together at various angles. Impressions of my fingers remain on the wax surfaces, even as they become cold and brittle.

Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash installation, detail view

Embedded in the work is the symbolism of the materials themselves, the beeswax speaks of the hive, the bees’ honeycomb home, as a nurturing life force for the bees and their vital role in ecosystems. The ash is a symbol of grieving, ritual and cremation.


Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash installation

The ways the honeybees build and adjust their wax-comb designs responses directly to the colony's' changing needs, and is integral to the communication and successful functioning of the super organism that is the beehive. All elements of the hive – worker bees, forager bees, queen bee, larvae, baby bees, drones, wax comb, temperature, form and space, nectar, honey and pollen – are interconnected and interdependent. The complex ecology of the world can be likened to the super organism of a beehive, where humanity is like a few foraging honeybees that cannot survive alone, separated from nature, outside the hive.


Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash installation

My interest in the ways that we can understand an embodied engagement with time, materiality and nature, through the sensory experience of art, reflects New Materialism’s vitality. This takes a positive approach to the potential for change in human attitudes, proposing that we have the intelligence and creativity to re-engage with nature, and the complex interconnections of our world.



* Maurizia Boscagli, Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014). P 13


Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash installation

 For more information on the 2014 SCA Graduate School Conference & Exhibition New Materialism see  sydney.edu.au/sca/research/new-materialisms 
The exhibition continues to 27 September 2014, open Monday to Saturday 11am - 5pm




Divest, beeswax installation - work in progress

Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash on wall

Divest traces embodied experiences of impermanence and instability through the tactile material qualities of beeswax and ash. Reflecting on the passage of time and fragility of life, these barnacle-like beeswax forms suggest notions of sanctuary, healing and containment, while the smattered layers of ash conjure feelings of unease and vulnerability.

Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash on wall, SCA studio
Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash on wall
Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash on wall
Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash on wall, SCA studio
Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash on wall, SCA studio
Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash on wall, SCA studio 

Divest will be installed in the SCA Gallery for the New Materialism exhibition, 9 - 26 September 2014.
Sydney College of the Arts, Park Drive, Lilyfield NSW (enter opposite Cecily Street) sca.galleries@sydney.edu.au

New Materialism exhibition invitation, SCA Gallery
Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash on wall
Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax and ash on wall, SCA studio