Kath Fries Studio: 2014

Divest installation at Articulate Project Space

Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax, ash and wooden pillar,
Articulate Project Space, detail view

As part of the group exhibition Articulate Turns Four: Colour, Form, Line, I'm exhibiting one of my Divest installations. This site-responsive work is made of beeswax and ash, interpreting the exhibition's themes of line and form - as the vertical line of the pillar and the cylindrical forms of the beeswax polyps. This work explores uncontainablity and seeping intersections between artifice and nature. Beeswax polyp forms cluster within an upright crevice of the gallery, seemingly seeping outwards to gradually invade the space. These aromatic translucent shapes suggest embodied presence but their surfaces are smattered with ash, which in turn conjures a sense of uneasiness, vulnerability and loss.

Link to more information about my Divest installations

Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax, ash and wooden pillar,
Articulate Project Space, 280x30x10cm

Colour, Form, Line is a theme-based group show curated by William Seeto for the end-of-year annual exhibition titled Articulate Turns Four. The exhibition theme of colour, form and line sets the context by providing a framework that enables discourse, and offers a means of connecting diverse art practices.

Featuring work by: Lisa Andrew, Elizabeth Ashburn, Clementine Barnes, Lynne Barwick, Linden Braye, Brogan Brunt, Sue Callanan, Andy Chi Yau Chan, Shirley Cho, Clara Chung, Vivienne Dadour, Ella Dreyfus, Judith Duquemin, Edwin Easydorchik, Michele Elliott, Nola Farman, Kath Fries, Brigitta Gallaher, Jane Gavan, Beata Geyer, Anne Graham, Veronica Habib, Yvette Hamilton, Laine Hogarty, Adrian Hall, Barbara Halnan, Sahar Hosseinabadi, Tom Issacs, Melissa Maree, Rose Ann McGreevy, Anne Mosey, Christine Myerscough, Jennifer O’Brien, Sue Pedley, Sergio Plata, Jacek Przybyszewski, Christopher Raymond, Margaret Roberts, Marlene Sarroff, Kevin Sheehan, Andrew Simmons, Sardar Sinjawi, Anke Stacker, Paul Sutton, Jane Burton Taylor, Toni Warburton, Gary Warner, Cecilia White, Elke Wohlfahrt, India Zeghan.

Articulate Project Space

497 Parramatta Rd, Leichhardt NSW

Articulate Turns Four: Colour, Form, Line

Curated by William Seeto

Opening event: 19 December, 6-8pm

Open hours: 11am-5pm, 20-28 December

(closed 25 & 26 December)

articulate497.blogspot.com.au

Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax, ash and wooden pillar,
Articulate Project Space, detail view

Branch Window Gallery - 'Decant' installation

Kath Fries, Decant, 2014, ceramic, ink and video projection, detail view

My Decant project is currently installed in Branch Window Gallery, and can be viewed from the footpath at 26 Ross Street Forest Lodge, everyday 9am-8pm, until 3 January 2015.

Kath Fries, Decant, 2014, ceramic, ink and video projection, 40 x 80 x 170 cm

Decant is an installation of broken and semi-disolved ceramic fragments, stacked like a pile of rubble or sediment falling and settling to the bottom of a container of liquid. Video footage of a slow flowing creek's tranquil reflections is projected in one of the objects, conjuring the presence of nature, erosion and cycles of disintegration and renewal. To decant is to pour the liquid out of a container and leave the sediment behind. In this project I've worked with the process and metaphor of decanting to explore how the passage of time and containment of memories can be poetically reflected in the residue and trace of pouring water.

Kath Fries, Decant, 2014, ceramic, ink and video projection, 40 x 80 x 170 cm,
photograph by Sarah Nolan, Branch Window Gallery

This project began last year, in response to two ceramic objects from the Fairfield Museum collection, which were found on the banks of nearby Prospect Creek in 1985, where they had been buried since the turn of the century. The ewers are thought to have been swept downstream during a flood, from a home of a Chinese market gardener, who lived and worked on the rich alluvial soil of the creek. Holding soy sauce and rice wine, these objects would have been cherished vessels, handled and used daily, a nostalgic and important reminder of home. Very little information was officially recorded about Fairfield's Chinese market gardeners, due to prevalent racist attitudes and the White Australia Policy at that time. The ewers are the only tangible record that Fairfield Museum has to signify the importance of these people in the history of the local community. However, today Fairfield municipal council proudly boasts having the most diverse multicultural population in all of Australia.

Kath Fries, Decant, 2014, ceramic and ink, detail view

In Decant, the ewers have been interpreted as containers of memory, imbued with stories that were not officially recorded, but which can still be sensed when holding the vessels. There is a strong embodied nostalgia, a felt tactile interconnection across time and place, evident in these plain everyday utilitarian objects. This sentiment resonated through my process of casting and recreating the ewers into a series of replicas, which were intentionally kept fragile and unfired, then dissected, semi-dissolved and broken as if to reveal the narratives held within. One segment shows video footage of the slow flowing, tranquil reflections of Prospect Creek. This small flickering light conjures the creek as part of an ancient watercourse that is constantly changing, drawing the viewer into a state of quiet contemplation about the primal importance of water, as both nurturing and destructive, throughout the world.

Kath Fries, Decant, 2014, ceramic, ink and video projection, detail view,
photograph by Sarah Nolan, Branch Window Gallery

For more information about this project please see www.kathfries/Decant-2014 and my studio process kathfries.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/decant-work-in-progress

Decant is on view at Branch Window Gallery

26 Ross Street, Forest Lodge NSW 2037

9am - 8pm everyday 7 Dec 2014 - 3 Jan 2015

www.branch3d.com.au

Branch Window Gallery invitation

Fishers Ghost Award Finalist - Decant installation

Kath Fries, Decant, 2014, ceramic and video projection

An installation of my ceramic and video projection, from my Decant project, is currently being exhibited in the Fishers Ghost Award.

kathfries.com/decant-2014

Fisher's Ghost Art Award Invitation

Fisher's Ghost Art Award Finalists Exhibition: 25 Oct - 14 Dec 2014

Campbelltown Arts Centre, 1 Art Gallery Rd, Campbelltown NSW

campbelltown.nsw.gov.au/FishersGhostArtAward

Gunyah artists in residence program - call for applications

As you may know, I co-ordinate the Gunyah artists in residence program in North Arm Cove, Port Stephens NSW. Applications are currently open for the 2015 program, which offers artists a retreat type of residency with low cost accommodation for self-directed solo, collaborative, group and family projects.

www.gunyah.blogspot.com.au

Gunyah house

Gunyah is a unique timber pole house, overlooking a peaceful bushland garden and the beautiful waterways of Port Stephens. The Gunyah property is owned and maintained privately by a group of friends and their families who built the house over thirty years ago. Since 2011 the AIR program has been an artist run, volunteer based, not for profit venture, aiming to share this special place and the inspiring region of Port Stephens.  

The 2015 Gunyah AIR program will feature seven residencies, each lasting eleven days.  Visual artists, writers, composers, performance and new media artists, curators, designers, arts administrators and other creators are encouraged to apply for solo, collaborative, group and family residencies.

Application details - www.gunyah.blogspot.com.au

Applications close 30 November 2014

Divest - window installation Fremantle Arts Centre

During my residency with Fremantle Arts Centre this month, I've been developing my Divest beeswax installation project and playing with different ways that this work can inhabit various spaces. I wanted to try and embed the funnels so they grew seamlessly out of the vertical surface of the window, and I found that the warm beeswax is malleable enough to stretch out into a thin marbled, dimpled, translucent membrane. When spread across the diamond grid of the leadlight window, bright sunlight from outside is filtered and softened - almost like being inside a living eggshell. I was equally fascinated by the way that the beeswax membrane peeled off the window like a skin being shed, and the funnels left behind intriguing subtle trace, like ghostly footprints on the old glass surfaces.

Kath Fries, Divest, 2014, beeswax installation, FAC studio

Kath Fries, Divest - trace, 2014, beeswax installation, FAC studio

Kath Fries, Divest - trace, 2014, beeswax installation , FAC studio

Weathering - changing light, changing stone: Fremantle residency

Detail view of eroding stone wall, Arthur's Head, Fremantle WA

A few locals have asked me why I wanted to do a residency in Fremantle. I think residencies are always valuable in terms of having concentrated time to focus on researching and making, but the place and location of the residency is also an important deciding factor for me. When I first visited Fremantle in 2009 I was only here for a day, but I remember being intrigued by the beautiful old crumbling, sensitively-restored colonial buildings clustered around the port. I wanted to return, spend some more time here and get a better feel for the place. And this residency with Fremantle Arts Centre is allowing me to do exactly that, to experience and think more deeply about what it is in these tactile, weathered and eroded surfaces that conveys the irrepressible impermanence of existence.

Layers of history run deeply within these restored surfaces. Colonial attitudes of staking claims of ownership; indiscriminate exploitation, decimation and dispossession of the local Indigenous population; prisoners subjected to cruel punishments and deprivations; and the harsh exploitation of free convict labour, were all key factors in building these structures and form the history of this place. Such uncomfortable past complexities are enmeshed in the materiality of Fremantle's heritage, constantly rising to the surface in various ways - they can't and wont be ignored or plastered over. The visible materiality of these walls, made of local stone, tell actual stories of their creation through their geology and convict pick marks, as well as suggesting permeating metaphors for other histories that are more immaterial or usually hidden from view.

Heritage stone walls, Arthur's Head and Fremantle Arts Centre

The past always manifests in how we experience the present, but often this is more apparent to us in historical locations that we can touch, identify and measure with names, dates and written records. Ceaseless human efforts to restore and repair erosion and weathering always interest me, in both old buildings and new. But there is something particularly poetic in these futile, valiant efforts to continually patch up the old stone heritage structures in Fremantle - some of the walls appear to be more mortar than stone. Worn away from weathering inside and out - floods, rising damp, unstable ground and changing sea levels are altering them internally, as much as the sun, wind and rain wear away their external surfaces. These fragile old textures have a fascinating vitality to them, the act of restoring and repairing demonstrates value and respect for materials, architecture, craftsmanship and history.

Sunset at Bathers Beach, Fremantle

My interest in impermanence and the passage of time manifests in the porousness and tactility of the materials I work with. Exploring how a material, object or experience can straddle more than one state of being and seemingly exist in more than one place at a time, is a leading premise in my practice. This porousness and flux is resonating throughout my experience of being in Fremantle, particularly at the end of the day when I walk down the road to the artificial harbour and man-made groynes, and watch the sunset over the expansive horizon of the Indian Ocean. Dusk is a magical part of the day, bookending a regular and particular passage of time with a spectacular change from daylight to colourful brilliance followed by twilight and the darkness of nighttime. The sunset colours are beautiful, but it is the rhythm and changing cycle of watching the sun set in this location almost everyday, and everyday different, which manifests in a profound and poetic way of contemplating our days, even as time constantly slips between and beyond those idealised measuring containers we try to keep it in.

Sunset at South Mole Lighthouse, Fremantle

The futility of chasing, trying to capture and hold onto things that change, is a constant activity in our lives. We try continuously to make objects, monuments and buildings that will last, we grasp onto moments and things that will all inevitably change and fade. But it is because they change and fade that these moments are beautifully impermanent and yet we want to cling to them and hold them still. My snapshots of sunsets echo this notion of futility, of trying to grasp the fleeting moment of beauty - even as it fades from view - to be remembered in a trace of digital pixels, which will soon become overlaid, irrelevant and ubiquitous.

Sunset at Arthur's Head, Fremantle

Fremantle Arts Centre WA artist-in-residence

I'm currently artist-in-residence at Fremantle Art Centre WA. It's an interesting place with its beautiful old buildings, sunsets over the ocean and vibrant cultural scene. Located on the southern side of the city of Perth at the mouth of the Swan River, the traditional owners of this area are the Whadjuk Noongar people. An important colonial port and convict settlement, Fremantle is renowned for its well-preserved architectural heritage. The two buildings I'm working in both date back to colonial times, the artist-in-residence apartment is in the Moores Building - a converted old storehouse near the port, and up the road I have a studio in Fremantle Arts Centre, which was originally the local lunatic asylum.

Fremantle Arts Centre AIR Studio - beeswax and old fashioned boiler

I've sourced some local beeswax for my residency project. Western Australia claims to produce some of the purest honey in the world, being so remote has some benefits - the honeybees here suffer from fewer of the pests and diseases that plague other parts of Australia and the rest of the world.

Fremantle Arts Centre AIR studio

These three windows of my studio face west and catch the afternoon sunlight

Like most of the old buildings here, Fremantle Arts Centre (FAC) was built from local stone with convict labour. Today FAC is vibrant with music concerts, performances, exhibitions and artists studios; but its history of convict labour, insanity and poverty lingers in the building's shadows with textured layers of spooky intrigue. My usual studio in Sydney at Sydney College of the Arts is a former psychiatric hospital, so it has a lot in common with FAC, and this place seems like an ideal site to continue working on my Divest installation project.

Day one ofFAC Divest installation, work in progress - beeswax on window

Day two of FAC Divest installation, work in progress - beeswax on window

Day three of FAC Divest installation, work in progress - beeswax on window and floor

In my FAC studio space there are three windows that face west and catch the afternoon sunlight. A number of my beeswax installations over the past year have been situated on windows with direct sunlight coming through them. I'm drawn to watching sunlight permeate interior spaces, and how the shadows' progression across the room tracks the passage of time and the uniqueness of that particular day.

Day three of FAC Divest installation, work in progress - beeswax on floor

The beeswax funnels in Divest are made by wrapping warm pieces of beeswax around my fingers in a healing bandaging gesture. Then one edge is stretched, torn and thinned out into a marbled, fingerprinted, membrane like transparency. Natural light from the window illuminates the brittle edges of the clustered barnacle like funnels. Positioned in the corners and crevices of the studio space, they imply the porousness of our artificial boundaries, as though a colony of insects or crustaceans have invaded and inhabited this interior human space, then absconded and left their shell-funnel homes empty and abandoned.

Day three of FAC Divest installation, work in progress

Day four of FAC Divest installation, work in progress, beeswax on window

Day five of FAC Divest installation, work in progress, beeswax on window

Divest is a process based project that considers cycles of healing, renewal, fragility, abandonment and entropy. The actual making and placing of the warm beeswax funnels is the pivotal stage of the work, so the resulting installation becomes just a trace of the process. The funnels are empty, although they look as though they may have contained insects or small sea creatures, what they actually held were human fingers. This embodied imprint links to ancient practices of using beeswax in healing and embalming processes, and questions the separation we often feel from nature in our contemporary lives today.