Kath Fries Studio

Skid-marks

Kath Fries, Skid-marks, 2009, charcoal and floorboards, gold embroidery thread, canvas, glass, feathers and rose thorns.

Skid-marks was exhibited in the group show Queen and Country. This installation traced a sense of continuing frictions of British colonisation. Charcoal was rubbed into lacerated canvases and topography of the floor. Gold embroidery thread knotted and trailed around the installation. A blacked pane of glass lent against the wall, trapping and semi-obscuring a circle of thorny rose branches. A shredded piece of truck tire completed the arc.

Queen and Country, 2 - 14 July 2009. Tanya Ljubic, Megan Yeo, Jessica Geron, Lexi Harper, Kate Churchyard, Kath Fries and Ally McKeller. Gaffa Gallery, 1/7 Randle St, Surry Hills NSW 2010

Pulse

A site-specific installation for Castaways Sculpture Festival on Rockingham beach, Perth, Western Australia, May 2009. Recycled materials including second hand clothing, yarn, upholstery off-cuts, textiles and fabrics were bound into 20 meters of the existing fencing along the Rockingham boardwalk.

Pulse reflects on our rapid consumption of textile products driven by the fashion industry and the often ignored environmental impact of fabric production and post-production. The world's demand for synthetic fibers has nearly doubled in the last 15 years, causing the expansion of manufacturing energy-intensive processes that require large amounts of crude oil, producing harmful emissions and toxic waste. Driven by consumer demand for cheap, new, fast products the garment industry has a notorious reputation for sweat-shops, relying on low-paid laborers working in poor conditions. However, consumers appear to place little value on these products - dumping about two million tonnes of clothing in landfill every year.

Pulse suggests that human existence is bound to our environment even as we destroy it, how we can continue along this destructive tangent of blind consumption?

Chocolate Braille

Wouldn't it be nice if the world was... 2009, Braille created from chocolate drops melted onto the gallery wall, March 2009, part of the group exhibition lure allure illusion at Gaffa Gallery.

The Braille tells the story of a young African boy, Aly Diabate, falsely lured away from his home in Mali to work on an Ivory Coast cocoa plantation. Slaving from dawn til dusk he struggled to carry large heavy bags of cocoa beans, often collapsing from fatigue and he was beaten severely for working too slowly. Aly was drastically underfeed and locked up at night with the other children, in a small confined room so they wouldn’t escape.
West Africa collectively produces three quarters of the world's cocoa supplies, so almost all the chocolate sold around the world today contains a percentage of cocoa produced by child slave labour. Perhaps our blind, almost childlike responses to the allure of chocolate fuels our naive illusions, but in reality our consumption of chocolate is much more destructive than than we superficially like to believe.

Siren's Song

An installation of feathers, mirrors, nylon and acrylic, March 2009, part of the group exhibition lure allure illusion at Gaffa gallery.

Sirens, in Greek mythology, were mystical, dangerous bird-women, whose singing lured passing sailors to their deaths. In this installation feathers are tantalizing, intimate and seductive, like the Siren's wings, however there is a subtle sinister undertone of doom and destruction.

lure allure illusion ~ exhibition invitation

www.lureallureillusion.blogspot.com

Olga's Music Box, Sculpture in the Vineyards 2008

Last year, my elderly next door neighbor, Olga, was telling me about the place she where she grew up in Hungary. It was a wine growing region that produced wonderful sweet wines and was famous for its beautiful popular trees. Olga remembers the sounds of the poplar leaves rustling in the breeze and singing the local folk songs about the autumnal golden poplar trees. In Greek mythology the poplar tree is the Tree of Life, because of its distinctly bicolored leaves; dark green on the side that faces Heaven, pale green on the side that faces Earth, representing the male/female duality from which all was born. This artwork, titled Olga's Music Box, is about nostalgia and they way that sounds can trigger half forgotten memories on the other side of the world.

The installation:
About 2 meters above the ground, strung between two poplar trees are five parallel lines of black hessian webbing, representing a music stanza.
The music notes are represented by large black poplar leaf shapes. On one side of each is a piece of broken mirror.
The leaf-music-notes are attached to the parallel lines with a swivel allowing the leaf-music-notes to spin freely in the breeze and the mirrored side catches and reflects the sunlight, creating dancing patterns of light on the shadowy ground.

Set amongst the poplar trees at Stonehurst Cedar Creek Vineyard, Olga's Music Box entices viewers deep into the forest of trees, as they catch glimpses of the leaf-music-notes glinting in the distance, a stanza of spinning silent music.

Flat-lining, Sculpture in the Vineyards 2008

This installation is a development of the heartbeat work that I installed at Stonehurst Cedar Creek last year.
Flat-lining is a site-specific work for the length of the barbed wire fence leading up to the cellar door at Undercliff Vineyard, Wollombi, The Hunter Valley. Red knitting yarn is bound around lengths of barbed wire for the entire length of the fence, occasionally zig-zagging like a heartbeat. The brightly coloured, soft, fuzzy-edged materiality of the yarn contrasts the harsh aggressive material of the barbed wire.

Flat-lining explores the concept of boundaries. The use of the barbed-wire fence conveys multiple associations of defense, aggression, possession, containment and protection. The colour, softness and tactility of the continuous red line of bound yarn, combined with the title, Flat-lining, indicates an indeterminate moment on the boundary between life and death.

The term Flat-lining is mostly used in the medical industry when a person's pulse has stopped, indicating a flat line on the heart monitor. Even at this point - the boundary can be breached in either direction - there is still the possibility of resuscitation.

Slumbering, 2008

multimedia installation MVA Post-Grad exhibition at SCA

dvd projection, mirrors, bamboo, vines, aluminum wire mesh, nylon, feathers, acrylic and charcoal on walls

"Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way bind us to life… what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past."

Winfried Georg Sebald and Michael Hulse, The Rings of Saturn (New York: New Directions, 1998), 255.

SCA Post-Grad Degree Show 08

SCA Postgraduate Degree Show 08
Opening Tuesday 9 December 6.00–8.00pm

My artwork will be in installation room one.

Exhibition continues to Wednesday 17 December. Opening hours: Monday to Saturday 11am–5pm

Sydney College of the Arts
The Visual Arts Faculty of the University of Sydney
Balmain Road, Rozelle, NSW Australia
(enter opposite Cecily Street)
+61 2 9351 1008
www.usyd.edu.au/sca

Quick-Unpick exhibition

Quick-Unpick - an exhibition of artwork influenced by sewing, textile patterns, knitting and embroidery by Kath Fries, Sophia Egarchos, Linden Braye, Virginia Mawer, Megan Yeo and Shannon Johnson.

Albion Street Gallery

105 Albion St Surry Hills

Opening drinks with the artists: Friday 10th Oct 6-9pm

Exhibition continues until 8 Nov 2008

Gallery Open: Tuesday to Saturday 11am - 5pm

Images left to right: Queen crown - Megan Yeo, Detail - Virginia Mawer, Burning out i - Kath Fries, Do you know what I’m Thinking - Linden Braye, Fever - Sophia Egarchos, Path of no return - Shannon Johnson, Chopper - Megan Yeo,