Curated by Sharna Barker & Natalie Lavelle

2 June — 26 June 2021

Hailey Atkins, Sharna Barker, Natalie Lavelle, Dana Lawrie, Molly Smith

Opening Saturday 5 June, 4 — 7pm

Sharna Barker, Change, Changing 2021, (detail) latex and shellac on calico, wire and plaster, 65cm x 24cm x 33cm (install variable). Photo by Jax Oliver. — Sharna Barker, *Change, Changing* 2021, (detail) latex and shellac on calico, wire and plaster, 65cm x 24cm x 33cm (install variable). Photo by Jax Oliver.

This exhibition examines the legacy of women and post-minimalist practice, led by the idea of the sensuous object. Each of the works tends to the characteristics and sensibility of this period, where there is a strong material presence and emotional, yet subtle, expressive quality. Working in pictorial and physical space, Atkins, Barker, Lavelle, Lawrie and Smith explore the strategies employed in the late 1960s and 1970s to question their relation to the contemporary world.

Within their methods, the focus is drawn to process, chance and sensation — reliant and in response to the material object. In all works there is a sense of the hand, prompted by the use of craft-based activities, emphasising tactile effects. These effects evoke visceral responses of the body, opening to an indirect form of personality accessed by the encounter with the materiality of the artwork. As Eva Hesse expressed, it is from a “total other reference point,” a space of felt interconnectedness between body and matter. This both relates to the way the artists are working with their materials, and by the relation between the viewer and the work.

Something More seeks to make its own footing in the trajectory of post-minimalist concerns, paving way for a revised emphasis on sensuous experience. By foregrounding process and material as their prominent focus, Atkins, Barker, Lavelle, Lawrie and Smith show us how the sensuous object speaks to a sense of belonging and connecting with the world, and their positions as five young women artists.

The artists in Something More have graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art with Honours from the Queensland College of Art (QCA). As a group of emerging and early career women artists, their practices speak to the boundaries between painting and sculpture, exploring human relatedness within an abstract aesthetic. By working at the boundaries of painting/sculpture and within abstraction, the works shift attention away from a conventional narrative structure toward a flexible and open expansion of form.

Their methods explore new ways of seeing, thinking and participating in the relation between self and world, critically drawing on the history of art to assign meaning in the material. By acknowledging the shift of sensibility and the legacy of the practices of women in the 1960s and 1970s, the artists in Something More continue to show the necessity to “re-elaborate for viewers today a female identity that is multiple and ‘in process’ and represents a thinking and feeling social subject”. (Susan L. Stoops, More Than Minimal: Abstraction and Feminism in the 70s).

Exhibition text